MRVED Business

Music Teachers Meet
The Music teachers gathered at the MRVED on Wednesday, October 7 for their annual best practice meeting.  As usual the day was filled with great discussion and awesome ideas were shared all around.  The morning was centered around grading practices and a "standards audit".  The afternoon consisted of lots of sharing and planning for MELT.  Overall, it was a great day with a great bunch of educators!

MELT Call for Presentation Proposals
It is that time of the year again!  Time to start looking for teachers to present at the MELT (MRVED Educators Learning Together) Conference in January.  The past few years we have had some great presentations by our local teachers.  Hopefully this year can be better yet.  Last year, there were over 90 sessions to choose from throughout the day with about 1/4 of them being led by local teachers.  My goal is to get to 50% led by local educators.  This is a great opportunity to share some of the awesome and unique things going on in your classroom.  If you would like to present, please fill out the form (linked below).  If you know of someone that would do an awesome job, encourage them to present.
Payment:

• $100 - Present one, 1-hour session
• $150 - Present the same 1-hour session twice
• $150 - Present one, 2-hour session
• $200 - Present two different 1-hour sessions

Please Note:

• If you want to present as a team, only one proposal needs to be made.  The person that makes the proposal will be the contact person for that group.
• Submitting a proposal does not commit you to presenting.  You are only providing the MRVED with information that you are interested in presenting.
• Brandon will contact you by the end of October if your session was selected.
• You may fill out more than one proposal.

Possible Session Ideas:

• Cross-Curricular Projects
• School Readiness
• SMART Training
• CPI
• Teaching Vocabulary
• 6+1 Traits of Writing
• Writing in the Elementary
• Daily 5
• Daily 3
• STEM/STEAM
• Coding
• Technology: SMARTBoard, Tablets, Content Area, Grade Level, Apps

MELT Call for Presentation Proposal Form

Upcoming Meetings
October 14, 2015  MRVED Common Date
October 22, 2015  Art Best Practices
October 23, 2015  Principals' Council
October 27, 2015  Math Best Practices
October 28, 2015  Superintendents' Council
October 29, 2015  Business Best Practices

Please note:  There will be no update next week due to MEA break.  Have a great break!

Parent/Teacher Conference Tips

Parent/Teacher Conference Tip
As a new teacher, I remember thinking to myself, "what do parent/teacher conferences even look like?"  "How do I conduct a conference?"  As a new teacher, I had never been to a parent/teacher conference in my life, either as a student, teacher, or parent.  I had no clue what to expect.  Edutopia has developed a great guide to walk you through a parent/teacher conference and offers some great advice for those who have participated in a "few" conferences.  As we approach the parent/teacher conference season, I suggest giving it a look today!

Edutopia Parent/Teacher Conference Article

Edutopia Student Led Conferences

Tech Tip - Google Expeditions Pioneer Program

Google Expeditions Pioneer Program

What is the program?
Expeditions teams will visit selected schools around the world, starting with the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. Each team will bring a complete Expeditions kit with everything the teachers need to take their students on journeys anywhere. The team will show teachers how Expeditions works and help set it up before class.

There is no charge or cost involved in the program.

What are expeditions?

Expeditions is a virtual reality platform built for the classroom. We worked with teachers and content partners from around the world to create more than 100 engaging journeys - making it easy to immerse students in entirely new experiences.

What you need

A minimum of 6 interested teachers. In order to take as many students as possible on an Expedition, we'll visit schools showing the most interest first.

A committed point person to help schedule the school visit and coordinate the day of the experience.

You can sign up by filling out the Google Expeditions Pioneer Program form.

SAMR Series - Augmentation

Augmentation
We will continue our 5 week series on Dr. Ruben Puentedura's  SAMR model with examining the Augmentation level of technology 

Last week we talked about the substitution level of the SAMR model being the level of tech integration where the technology acts as direct substitute of what is already being done in the classroom.  With the example being given that if we have students hand-writing papers in the classroom, using a word processor instead would act as substitution because the task of writing the paper has not changed.

As we focus on the Augmentation level, the technology still acts as a direct substitute but there is a functional change in the task.  Let's take the word processing example a little further.  The task is to write a paper, we use the word processor to type the paper.  If we start to use the feature of the word processor, such as spell-check and grammar check, we start to see functional improvement.  We could also use the word processor to change the formatting or add in different fonts that we wouldn't easily be able to do if we were writing by hand.  So as you can see, the task of writing the paper stayed the same, but there is some functional improvement to using the word processor.

For most, using the functions of a word processor are a given when typing the paper, but the examples serves as a good illustration as to how the SAMR ladder works.  Often times, we forget to tell our students why we are using the technology and how the technology will make the task easier or better.  It is vital that we point out to our students the "why".  Because if we don't, then some students may struggle to see a reasoning behind what we are doing.  These are the ones that will typically say, "can I just do this with paper and pencil, because it's easier".  These students have not been told or shown why the word processor makes the task better.

Next week we will look "above the line" and get into transformational practices of technology integration.