Edcamp PCTX 2016

This past Saturday, learners from all over North Texas gathered at Weatherford High School to participate in the 3rd Annual Edcamp Parker County. What was new about this edcamp was that we invited students to attend. Adding student voice and perspective to the conversation was an enlightening experience for educators and empowering for our students.

It was amazing to see the number of people willing to come together on a beautiful Saturday morning to learn & connect. You could tell it was going to be a great day, when at 8:15 someone asked if we had any more name tags because we were out! That meant that over 100 people were already here! The library filled up and there was definitely a buzz of energy in the room as sessions were suggested and the schedule was completed.

Our district librarians set up a makerspace area that was an instant hit! Attendees were able to try out different gadgets that they might want to add to their own makerspaces. Our student attendees definitely enjoyed this area!

A green screen was set up for people to use and discussions centered around how easy it would be to add something like this to a classroom, whether it be a set up with fabric & lights or just green paper on the wall. Great resources were shared for using green screens in the classroom.

As you moved from room to room, session to session, you could hear great ideas being shared. In the virtual reality session, learners of all ages enjoyed trying out the viewers. 

One of the best parts of an edcamp is the connections made with other passionate educators. Some attendees were new to Twitter and others are well-connected, but all were able to find people to add to their PLN.

Edcamps are made possible thanks to community support and generous donations. Our door prize table was overflowing with t-shirts, books, gadgets & gift certificates! The Edcamp Foundation helps support local edcamps with a box of supplies and $200 through their Impact Grant. We used the $200 to purchase a GoPro for a door prize.

Thankfully, the learning doesn't stop with just a one day edcamp. Resources were collected in a collaborative document, which allows attendees to keep learning after they leave. And there is always an edcamp within driving distance! Check out the calendar for an edcamp near you!

A closing note... Edcamps are a TEAM EFFORT and Edcamp PCTX was no different! A special thanks to Natalie Simmons for getting our t-shirts, Jacqueline Rose & Erin Griffith for arranging breakfast, Katy Smith & Pam Conover for all of the little details that made the edcamp run smoothly, Brett Murrey for gathering door prizes, and all of the other people who worked to make this year's edcamp a success!

What Happens When We Empower Teachers?

There is nothing better than talking with an excited teacher, one who has just learned of an idea or has had a revelation or a shift in mindset. And when you can also give them a "YES" go ahead and try that great idea, then you are setting them on a path to share that excitement with other educators and their students. It is a win-win for everyone and an opportunity to positively impact the culture of that district. As I read this article, When School Leaders Empower Teachers, Better Ideas Emerge, I realized that just as we want teachers to empower student learners, district leaders should empower our educators. When this happens, it would seem that progress would happen more quickly and leadership capacity is being built.

Having someone listen to you and be willing to say yes to your idea is very empowering for students, teachers, or anyone else for that matter. Recently, this idea was brought to my attention during a webinar where Dr. Pam Moran, Superintendent in Albemarle County Public Schools in Virginia, where she talks about getting past the "yeah, but and getting to what if can be pretty difficult." You can watch her TedX Talk called Getting Ourselves to Yes where she describes this situation.

Leaders in school districts are often faced with this. An excited teachers come to you with an idea they want to try, and your brain goes through a list of "buts" that tend to deflate the excited teacher fairly quickly. But it doesn't have to be that way, and the results of saying yes can be huge. Here are just a few examples from this year where I have seen "Yes" turn into amazing opportunities for all learners.

Several teachers around our district wanted to re-design their classroom space. These teachers felt like creating a learning space that was kid friendly, comfortable and flexible would allow for collaborative learning opportunities that would become a natural part of their classroom culture. The teachers were able to verbalize their "Why" which is an important part of getting to "Yes"! Since most of what we know about classroom space is desks in rows, it would be natural for principals to say "yeah, but..." Instead, we watched as teachers created these spaces uses their own funds, Donor's Choose and any other donations they could find. Here are just a few of the Innovative Spaces that were created around our district.

During the school year, we had "early adopters" excited about Canvas, our new LMS. Without training or professional development, they were creating a blended learning environment for their students. These teachers expressed a desire to learn more and to offer a true blended learning course at the secondary level. This is not something our district had tried before, so our Executive Director of Secondary Education, Dr. Lance Campbell arranged for them to visit districts who had successfully implemented blended learning. Not only did he support their efforts with training, but also helped them as they redesigned the physical space. It used to be that our campuses were very "institutional" looking with colorless walls and 25-30 desks in a classroom. Through conversations and research, these teachers created plans for their new spaces, based on research and looking at current trends in collaborative workspaces. James Gibbens, middle school teacher, had many conversations with his campus administrator about developing a learning environment for his students. Through these conversation, support was received for a blended learning class, as well as a redesign of classroom space and repurposing space around the entire campus to create collaborative work areas.

One of our blended learning teachers, Macie Thompson has started blogging about her experience. She created a floor plan & a Pinterest board with the items she would need to create the type of learning space she felt would benefit the collaborative culture she wanted to have for her students. With her careful planning and knowing her WHY, she was able to get a "Yes" from Dr. Campbell. 

Another example is a personalized professional development pilot that two teachers proposed just a few days ago. These two teachers, Amanda Rogers & Amanda Mask are "out of the box" thinkers and self-directed learners. They can often be found attending edcamps and presenting at conferences, both near and far. During a Google Summit in May, they learned of a personalized GAFE PD program that would involve a self-assessment and a menor/mentee relationship that would help teachers move from Level 1 to Level 2 or Level 2 to Level 3. Level 2 & 3 teachers would mentor Level 1 teachers, with the hope that everyone would move up to at least the next level within 1-2 years. The teachers worked on their proposal, knew their WHY and were easily able to share this with Racheal Rife, our Executive Director of Elementary Education (and, unexpectedly, our Superintendent, Dr. Jeffrey Hanks.) With their plan, they would pilot it with volunteers on their campus and hopefully a "sister" campus within our district. The teachers accepted ideas, such as allowing it to be voluntary, and adding a digital portfolio and digital badges to their program, and were given a YES by Rife. By building leadership capacity and empowering these teachers, the reach will be much farther than what any one person could do alone. 

Our district is moving to more YES's than NO's, and is making progress in the "yeah, but" area, but it is a work in progress. Where is your district? How often do you say "yes" as a leader? 

Librarians as Future Ready Leaders

On June 24, 2016, Future Ready Schools added Librarians to their initiative with Future Ready Librarians. AASL & Follett are project collaborators and thought partners include Carolyn Foote and Joyce Valenza. Read Joyce's SLJ post about Launching Future Ready Librarians The framework will help librarians stay relevant and active in an evolving education system. 

This is an exciting announcement and something we have been working on in Weatherford ISD and definitely something we will use this summer as we map out a three-year plan for our district libraries. 

Future Ready Librarians recognizes that teacher-librarians can and should be at the forefront of changing education and can and should take on leadership roles on their campuses or within their districts. Many librarians are already supporting teachers as they integrate future ready skills into instruction, helping to create good digital citizens, creative thinkers and global collaborators. Many librarians are playing active roles in technology initiatives such as 1:1 rollouts or BYOD on campuses. Many librarians are just as active in technology organizations and conferences, as they are with librarian and literature conferences. With this initiative, these efforts will become more focused and more universal. This will become the norm among teacher-librarians and not the exception.

Looking at each area of focus, you can see the makerspaces we have added to many of our libraries fit right in. In Weatherford, several librarians have created coding clubs and Minecraft clubs, which encourage creating instead of just consuming. 

As you can see, a part of this is creating a learning environment that belongs to the students and staff on a campus, one that is flexible and has multiple uses. Designing collaborative spaces that support blended learning, genius hour, and technology integration should be something we prioritize when we think about our library space. The present day library should look and feel very different than libraries in the past. Schedules might need to be tweaked, purchases might need to be re-evaluated, and the way we have always done things might not be meeting the needs of today's learners. 

It is an exciting time to be a librarian and we should use the guiding questions as we think about our upcoming school year:

How can librarians and libraries support Future Ready schools?

How can librarians and libraries become more Future Ready?

What will you do this year to become more Future Ready?

Creating Future Ready Advocates

For several years, our school district has been using the Visioning Document as a tool to drive change in the way we do things. If you aren't familiar with this document, it involved  35 superintendents in Texas in 2008 who wanted to create a new vision for public education in Texas. It is clearly labeled as "a work in progress" and is meant to start conversations about how public education could and should change. Many of our principals have gone through the Principal Visioning Institute and they brought it down to the teacher level in WISD. 

This past school year, we changed the name to Future Ready Academy, but the premise was the same- helping teachers grow professionally without the expectation of it being a "trainer of trainer" role. Then we heard about the iSchool Initiative and both their Certified Teacher program & iSchool Student Advocate program. I visited with April Riley from Aledo ISD and she shared with me the impact the teacher program had on their district. After discussions with Travis Allen, founder of iSchool Initiative, we secured dates for the Student Advocate program. We eventually added the Certified Teacher program, but that post will come later. 

The Student Advocate program was held late in May, when schedules are crazy and days are already jam-packed! Everyone made the best of it, and we started the application process, which included interviews on three different campuses. Although the process was tedious, it was a good experience for the students to go through, and one that will probably serve them well as the continue along their educational journey. One thing that was clear, Weatherford ISD has AMAZING students! If we had 80 spots, we could have filled 80 spots. Unfortunately, we were limited to 40 students, 10 on each of the secondary campuses. 

After the selection process, students attended a three day training with involved public speaking, problem solving, team building, ISTE Standards for Students, digital citizenship, identifying issues in our district, solutions, and finally a presentation. It was fast-paced and a lot was covered in the three short days, but it was inspiring to see the student presentations on the last day. 

Technology was a natural part of the day, students using their Chromebooks to answer questions and find information without being told. Sometimes teachers feel that they have to come up with an activity to use technology, but really it should be a tool, just like paper, pencils, calculators, or textbooks.

A parent meeting was held after the first day, to share with parents about the program and what it means for the students to be an iSchool Student Advocate. As the meeting was about to begin, one of the iSchool leaders talked to the students who were in attendance and tasked them with facilitating the meeting. The students stepped up to this challenge without even a second of hesitation and were able to easily share what had taken place on the first day of the program. It was great to see the confidence and their ability to verbalize what they learned from the first day. One student said, "If school was like this every day, I would love coming to school!" 

On the 2nd day, District Administrators came in and talked about issues in our district that the students might want to create solutions for during this program. Not all of the issues involved technology, but the solution could. 

Students got busy choosing an issue and then working on creating a solution. There was a lot of discussion and brainstorming during this part of the program. Students had already been working with Google Slides, so this was a natural tool for them to use.

On the third day, the students polished up their presentations that they worked on the day before. One group was so motivated to have a great presentation that they spent an additional 4-5 hours at Chick-Fil-A working on their project after they had already been working on it during the 2nd day. That is an empowered learner!

Then it was time to start pitching their solutions to an audience. We did this jointly with students in Aledo ISD, so the audience was even bigger. The students did such a great job, especially considering the short amount of time they had to work with. 

We are very excited to see this program grow and are looking forward to seeing all that our Student Advocates are able to accomplish this next school year. Their first project will be to help with our Back to School District-Wide Convocation! 

Stay tuned for a post about our experience with the iSchool Certified Teacher program! Creating even more Future Ready Advocates!

What? It is May (I mean JUNE!!) ?!?

I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but it is MAY  JUNE!!! I saw this image on Facebook recently, and this is just how I feel right now! Or at least that was how I felt a few weeks ago when I started this blog! Sometimes blog posts take a little longer than expected. 

During the last few months, the focus has been on creating a personalized learning environment for ALL. This means we are looking at ways to personalize learning for our students, as well as for our adult learners! For our students, we are developing blended learning classes at one of our middle school campuses and at our high school. Blended learning is a learning environment where students learn with both face to face instruction and an online component. 

After touring a couple of districts during the fall, we have started our own journey into blended learning. Teachers and administrators first visited campuses in Lewisville ISD and saw how teachers created blended learning environments in a variety of content areas and at different levels. Sometimes, just seeing the physical space helps us to shift the way we see our learning spaces. On each of the campuses, there were many different types of collaborative spaces for the students to use while on campus. At the high school level, students could choose not to work on campus on their online days, but space was certainly available if the students were on campus.

We were able to see first hand the power of a blended learning environment. In a high school algebra class, students were receiving one on one help, even though it was not a face to face day. 

At the middle school level, students would check-in at various collaborative spaces using a device and a Google form and begin work.

Lewisville ISD was so gracious as to invite us to attend a blended learning training in the spring. We took eight teachers to the training, some who will be teaching a blended learning course in the fall, and some who are interested in learning more and offering a blended learning environment for their students.

We will be reading the book, Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools by Michael B. Horn & Heather Staker.

Our journey has just begun, but we are excited about the possiblities and how we can better meet the learning needs of our students! 

Rolling Out Our Professional Learning Badges

Well, we did it! We pushed out our new WISD Professional Learning Badges program. It wasn't quite ready, but we pushed it out anyway. Recently, at EdShift 2016, a presenter talked about how companies push out products that might not quite be perfect and allowed their consumers to help them make it better. We felt like our badge program could work like that and it did! Teachers immediately let us know which links weren't working, what badges they wanted added, and suggestions for making the site easier to navigate. You can read about the beginning of our professional learning badges program HERE.

Our site first looked like this:

We thought it looked good, until we saw other sites. Other sites were more polished, more professional looking. Thankfully, I was able to connect with several people at TCEA who helped me improve our site! First, I went to a session by Michelle Phillips of Prosper ISD. She helped me see that a team of ONE can actually create and manage a professional learning badge site. Her site, EdTech in Action covers her process very clearly and has great suggestions for being successful. In addition, I talked with Dr. Roland Rios of Ft. Sam Houston ISD, who gave me access to his entire badging site. What a help that was, as I worked to make our site better! Here is what our site looked like AFTER TCEA:

Thanks to conversations and help from Brandi Rosales, I was able to clean it up and make it look better! And thanks to Google, I was even able to manipulate the HTML code to delete the borders on the table. I just "Googled" it! It has also been great to bounce ideas off of others, such as Sara Romine, a member of my Twitter PLN, who has created a digital badge system for her campus. I am always so appreciative of all who are willing to help! 

I probably should have taken the advice about rolling the program out to just a campus or two, but we decided to roll it out to the whole district. It was first shared  on our monthly Future Ready Focus. Luckily, not everyone reads it, so badge request submissions were slow at first. After I got back from TCEA and sent the information out again, the badge requests started coming in quickly! After a couple of days, almost 70 badges had been requested! In addition, several new badges had been suggested, and the site had been tweaked  a bit more! 

With badge requests coming in, a badge holder had to be created, as well as a plan of how to print & distribute badges. After a vote in the office, this was our chosen badge holder:

Badges were then printed on 1.5 x 1.5 in stickers (Avery 22805), which could them be placed on the laminated poster. We printed and laminated 100 posters and then printed sheets of all of the stickers. Our whole department jumped in to help, which was greatly appreciated! I then went through the different spread sheets and organized badge holders & badge stickers for all who had requested them. 

Today we started distributing badges to the different campuses. It was a lot of fun to see everyone excited about receiving their badges! Here are just a few pictures from the day!

More badge requests are coming in, more badges need to be delivered, and more badges need to be created and added. There are certainly improvements that can be made, but we are excited about where we are headed and look forward to growing our badge program, maybe moving to a digital badge program in the future.

* Something I would recommend, that was recommended to me (that I DIDN'T do) is to create the forms so that they populate just ONE spreadsheet. We will make this change soon, as keeping up with 6 different spreadsheets is a little much. AutoCrat will also make some of this easier, so I hope to become more proficient in that soon.

For more help with creating badging systems, check out Kasey Bell's post on Badges in Professional Learning on her Shake Up Learning website.

TCEA 16 Takeaways

I just returned home from a week FULL of learning, connecting, sharing & growing at TCEA in Austin. The connections I made, both new and old, made the week a great experience! 

My focus for the week was on learning more about creating personalized professional learning opportunities for our teachers and supporting a 1:1 initiative. Google tools and tips are always on my radar, so I planned to work that in also! Thankfully, my TLBFF, Tina Berumen, created a collaborative Google Doc for session notes, so that we could all share & learn! 

The Google Academy was a great day of learning all things Google! From the Keynote Panel to all of the breakout sessions, I learned so much. The session on Google sites by Christy Fennewald gave me helpful information on how to make my WISD Professional Badges site better. I was cautioned to not have too many tabs, and to work on eliminating drop-downs. 

By Tuesday, we had about 35 people from WISD at TCEA to learn! One of our assistant principals, Leslie Ackmann, had create a Google+ Community for all of us to share our notes and presentation information. We also established a district hashtag for TCEA, #WISDtcea16, which enabled us to share learning quickly. It was awesome to see the excitement as they went from session to session, tweeted & posted! We even had one campus, our Ninth Grade Center, that would meet each evening to debrief.  The best part- the teachers organized this! 

As I was gathering information on badging for professional learning, I met so many helpful people! It is so funny how things will transpire, but I mentioned to my friend, Michelle Cooper about the badge system. She introduced me to Scott Floyd who had created a system for White Oak ISD, who introduced me to Dr. Roland Rios, from Fort Sam Houston ISD. Scott also told me that I need to meet Kelly Fitzgerald. What is amazing is how each of these people spent time and shared resources with me, someone they had just met, to help me create a successful badging system for our teachers. Coincidentally, Kasey Bell of ShakeUpLearning also updated a blog post on Badging, which was sent to me no less than four times! Guess what I am working on this weekend?!

I was also reminded that some of the best learning happens outside sessions, in hallways, at tables at the back of the exhibit hall, at dinner, anywhere you are able to have conversations with others. I'm so appreciative of the time Brandi Rosales took to help me with features for the badge site! We truly have some AMAZING people in education in North Texas!!

There were no shortage of sessions offered for 1:1 rollouts, initiatives, PD and support! A couple of the best were Chad Jones from Lamar CISD who went step by step on how to rollout devices or programs. It was so thorough, from starting with the end result and working backwards, to developing a detailed planning document to make sure all stakeholders are involved and informed. Their instructional technology website, iCafe, is amazing and helps teachers find the help they need at any time of day! 

Another great session was by Temple ISD's Instructional Technology team, Jessica Mays & Jacki Wright. What I liked best about this session is they shared how they worked through issues they had when implementing 1:1 at their high school. It is always helpful when people share their failures, along with their successes! Our high school will soon have a student tech team, so it was great to hear about their TechCats & how they work with teachers & students, along side the instructional technology specialists!

Other cool things that happened:
I presented with two out of my three #TLBFFs, Nancy Jo Lambert & Tina Berumen! We presented on Knocking Down Your Library Walls during the Librarian Academy. 

I met Eric Sheninger, author of Digital Leadership and Uncommon Learning. I have recently read both of his books, so it was nice to be able to meet him in person. Hopefully we can get him to our district soon! And that is Matt Arend photo-bombing! He is an elementary principal in Plano and doing great things in education! I've followed his journey on Twitter and enjoy reading his blog.

Being able to see the excitement & engagement of our teachers was awesome! We had two teachers present on Knocking Down the Walls in Your Classroom. Amanda Rogers & Jacqueline Rose connect their students as a normal part of their classroom environment. They even had students join in the presentation! 

And I found two of our teachers, Jessi Medlin & Shelly Stout, being interviewed in the TCEA Radio booth! I know they will be taking their new learning back to their classrooms, teams & campus!



It was a great week and there were many more connections that happened that inspired me to keep learning & growing! I finally was able to meet Jess Malloy & Ryan Steele, who have created an amazing learning commons on their campus! My #oneword for 2016 is ACTION, so I will be immediately putting into action my new learning about badging systems for professional learning. 


** To grow your #PLN on Twitter, be sure to click on names. They are all linked to the individual Twitter accounts**