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!

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.