School-Wide Goals and a Book Study with Edmodo

After receiving the results from our IOWA tests (the standardized test we take in October each year), our Pre-K to 1st and 2nd to 4th grade PLCs decided their SMART goal for this year would be Vocabulary. Our students struggled the most with vocabulary on this year's tests, so they decided it would be our main goal for the remainder of the year.

Fast forward a few months: ASCD sent me a group of 5 books to review, and one of them was Vocab Rehab by Marilee Sprenger (from ASCD's Arias collection). The Arias collection consists of short books, about 35 pages long, that can be read in a sitting and are easily digestible. I read the book and left it with my teachers to read, each of them deciding they would read it in an evening and give it to the next teacher. They will all be finished by the end of this week.

The book had a lot of great activities in it to teach Vocabulary in about 10 minutes a day. I have set up an Edmodo group for the teachers who are interested and created an "assignment." Each of them will post their favorite activity after reading the book and it will give us a place to keep all of that information.

Any of you who do book studies - how do you keep track of them? I would love to hear the different ideas!

#20Time (AKA Genius Hour), #michED and Teacher Professional Development

I spent this last weekend in Grand Rapids, MI at the #MACUL14 conference (Michigan Association of Computer Users in Learning).  Aside from being able to finally meet some of my twitter peeps in person (@TechNinjaTodd, @KleinErin, @bloch574 and @gcouros to name a few!) - I attended a few really amazing sessions and had an interview with one of my #michED colleagues, Brad Wilson (@dreambition).  Brad produces the #michED podcast and asked me to interview with him while at the conference.



 

macul.org

 

Brad had quite a few thought-provoking questions, which are always nice in an interview.  One of the conversations we had was discussing how @Twitter could be utilized for teacher professional development.  It really got me thinking (I will link to that podcast when it is published) and I went back to one of the sessions I attended at #MACUL14 by Nicholas Provenzano (@thenerdyteacher).  Nicholas was presenting on his #20Time project, also known as Genius Hour.  The premise is that you give your students 20% of their time (1 class period a week) to learn about whatever they want.  They blog about what they learned and do a presentation at the end of the year.  Nick's school is hosting a TEDx talk in June where some of the students will present their projects in a TEDtalk.

What if we used this model for teacher professional development?  What if we gave the teachers one staff meeting a month to learn about WHATEVER they wanted.  Write up their findings, turn it in (on Edmodo, a blog, whatever) and make our PD differentiated.  Would this help the school?

Has anyone utilized this model or anything similar to it in their building?  How did it work out?  What do we do about state regulations regarding hours of PD?  I would love to hear your comments.