 Hello and welcome everybody to learn with the expert as we are waiting for everyone to come on into this virtual room. We would love to have you introduce yourself in the chat, share where you're from, what your role is, your school or district. The chat is located on the right hand side of the screen. If you don't see it, just look in the bottom right corner for a little chat icon and tap on that to open up the chat. Today we are so excited to have the founder of the SAMR model, a model for technology integration, Ruben Pointadora with us today. He is going to share how technology can help us develop the skills and solutions that prepare for unpredictable events while improving what we are doing right now. Before we go ahead and dive in, I do have a few housekeeping items for all of you. If you have any questions during the session that you would like Ruben to answer, please click on the Q&A tab and ask them there. This just assures that we don't miss any of those amazing questions that you have. If there are any questions that go unanswered, we will make sure to reach out to you after this webinar to respond to your question. All other comments, thoughts, concerns, reactions can be put in the chat tab so that everyone who is joining us today can view them. If you are just jumping in, just make sure your chat and your Q&A tabs are open. If they're not, click on that little chat icon that you will find in the lower right hand corner of your screen and that will open up the options to toggle between the chat and the Q&A tabs. You'll also notice that there is a handouts tab there as well and that is where you will find all the resources that we will be sharing from today's session. We will also share those resources in a follow-up email. This session is being recorded so that link to that recording will be shared in that email as well as a certificate of attendance for today's webinar. And you should receive that in about 24 to 48 hours after the webinar concludes. So let's see who we have with us. Wendy Stover, welcome. We have digital learning leader. Hello, Becky from Berkshire, England. Hello, hello, welcome. Jen Hopkins who is a technology TOSA from Portland, digital learning specialist. Hi, Karen. Welcome. I'm an instructional technology coach from Minnesota. Hi, Rachel. Hello, Kelly from Columbus classroom technology coach. Great. Welcome, everybody. We've had people from Arkansas, special ed teacher from Chicago. Hey, Stacy, I'm from Chicago too. Welcome, welcome, welcome. So it is so great to have you with us. Now that we know who is joining us today, let's introduce our team. My name is Mia. I am the training and professional development specialist here at CESA. I am also a former educator. I taught kindergarten. I am from Chicago and talked to kindergarten for 10 years in the Chicago public school system. Oh, hello. I see some more people from Illinois. Welcome, welcome. All right, here at CESA, we really believe that effective integration of technology is really what makes new learning experiences possible. So this is why we're so excited today to have our expert with us. So without further ado, let's meet our expert. Dr. Ruben Puentadora is the founder and president of PIPASIS, a consulting firm focusing on transformative applications of technology in education. He is also the creator of the SAMR model, which many of you are familiar with, but this is a technology integration model used for selecting, using and evaluating technology in education. Ruben is here to share a leadership perspective of learning technologies today to discover how teachers in our schools and classrooms can not only be preventative, but really transformative in the way they use technology and the way they share with teachers how to use technology. So welcome, Ruben. We are so excited to have you. Thank you. Well, again, thank you all for coming. It really is a pleasure to be here and I'm very happy to be working with all of you today. So what I'm going to be talking about today is learning technologies from a leadership perspective, but a leadership perspective in a world that as we found out during the pandemic is a black swan world. In other words, what we found out when we had to deal with the pandemic was that the technology wasn't just nice or an enhancement or a good thing to have. It became essential when we all had to go either remote or hybrid or some blender off. I know this from your introductions. We've got people from all over the world, so different countries, different regions, even within countries, etc. Schools took different approaches. But at one point or another, we were all looking to see what can we do with technology in this black swan world. Now, the question is, well, okay, so the pandemic has now subsided in many ways. We are able to do things we weren't able to do during the peak of the pandemic. But does that mean that things are back the way they were? Well, no, because we are in a black swan world. In other words, a black swan is an unpredictable event. It cannot be predicted by its very nature. If you can predict it, it's not a black swan. And we are in a world where we're going to be seeing not just one or two of these black swans, but repeated black swans, repeated events that we'll have to deal with and anything that we can look at, contemplate, think about involves uses of technology. Now, why is it important that we be ready for black swans? In other words, we, in the pandemic, we went to emergency remote learning mode and then from there evolved new tactics. But the thing is, when you get hit with a black swan, there are four paths and two of the paths are not good. One is what's called existential risk, which is after the black swan, you simply can't continue to do what you are doing. You effectively disappear as an institution or near term risk, which is when you come out of the black swan event, but your severely handicapped in terms of what you can do, how you can do it and so on. What most people look towards with the pandemic and how they think about black swan events is resilience. And in other words, you come out of the black swan event much the same way you went in before. So you have something to deal with the black swan event, but then afterwards you continue the way you were doing things before. But there's a fourth option, which is described as antifragility. Antifragility is when you come out of a black swan event better than you went in, more able to do more things in different ways, more effectively with more people. And this isn't because you say, oh, are black swans good? No, no, no. Believe me, there's nothing good about something like the pandemic. It was tragic, sad, destructive, all of those things. But that doesn't mean that some institutions within the process of the pandemic learned new ways of doing things that after the immediate black swan of the pandemic say, okay, now we can do this better, more effectively, etc. We did it before and that's antifragility. That's intellect who created the whole concept of the black swan and its modern conception is also the person who you have created this term. And it's important to realize for all of you in a leadership position. I know as many of you are technology coordinators, many of you are director of instructional services. And as you're thinking about this, you can say, well, isn't resilience enough? The trouble is if you target resilience, and it doesn't work. You fall to one of the two risk positions and that's not good. But if you target antifragility, even if you're not fully successful, you only fall to resilience. So that's another reason why, in fact, targeting antifragility is also, frankly, a good insurance policy in the context of black swans. Now, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I want to very briefly give you an idea of six places where we are likely to be seeing black swans emerge from in the near future. That's why I call the nesting grounds. And there are three which are sort of systemic climate change, pandemics and human movements. And then there are three more that have to do with how people interact with each other, which is the future present of information technology, of work, and of living. The reason I use the future present is because we are talking about trends that continue into the near to mid-range future, but are already present today. So let's go briefly into these and I'm just going to highlight each of them. In the context of at least one thing you should keep in mind in terms of your work as leadership in schools. So let's look first at the three systemic nesting grounds. First, climate change. Okay, climate change is here. Sadly, we're not going to be able to avoid some of the serious consequences. If you look at the graph on the left, we're looking at the middle curve, which is where we're going to land, which is not where everybody wanted to land, not the middle curve at the bottom. But that means that you're going to be dealing with events such as you see on the right-hand side, such as temperature extremes, heavy precipitation events, heavy droughts. Depending on where you are in the world, one or more of these will affect you in different ways. But there's really no place in the world where you're not going to be affected by at least one of these. And it's important to realize, as you're thinking of your role, that this means that you need to keep hybrid options in mind. In the pandemic at the beginning, it was important that to prevent spread, children work from home that we don't have the spread through schools, etc., etc. But with something else, such as climate change, it might be necessary for the children to be spending more time in school because their homes might be flooded or not be, or it might be too hot in ours and the school might be the safe place. So you need to be thinking in terms of how do you shift the locale of instruction in many ways, depending on what could happen here. For pandemics, it's not just sadly, I wish it were, but it's not just COVID. We are also looking at things like flu, we're looking at things such as other respiratory diseases, dengue in some regions. In malaria, in other words, we are far from being rid of pandemics as a major effect. But again, in terms of the role that you play in schools, the role that you can play in terms of creating what we saw in the current pandemic help teachers and students using resources such as those made available, for instance, by the HSS Office of Science and Technology to help you contextualize what's going on. So here, for instance, what's the airborne decay of COVID-19? Help people think about this. Is in fact a way in which you're saying, well, it is the technology in a way that is helping people think about what's happening in school, in a way that will help them reassure them, help you do a better job. The question of human movement stands a huge range from areas that are losing population to areas that are gaining population, from areas that have population moving in from neighboring communities, to areas that are having a population moving internationally. Again, just a couple of maps to illustrate this, but in your roles, all of you need to be thinking about this in terms of how you use technology. How do you address the needs of populations for students, for instance, who may not have English as their first language? How do you address the needs of populations that might be migratory so your students might be moving in or out of districts? Again, something to keep in mind as you're thinking about both how you use technology in your work in a school, how you define an institution that can handle the black swans that we sought from this. And as I said, there's the relational nesting grounds that have to do with how people relate to each other, how they interact. So, for instance, one of the ways in which people interact is through different types of information technologies. Now, the big one that everybody is talking about these days is artificial intelligence. And I'm actually not going to spend time today on artificial intelligence. If any of you are curious, I'm talking next week on Brian Alexander's Future Transform about artificial intelligence. But it's a huge topic and it simply would exceed the amount of time we have to do justice to it today. But there are other things. So, for instance, uses of social media. One of the questions that we always have is how do students use social media responsibly or well or not use it? But it's also true of teachers. And if you're thinking of how to construct experiences, as we're going to see in a little bit, where teachers work with each other to develop new uses of technology in the school and you're looking to support them, social media comes into the picture. You need to think about the fact that platforms aren't monolithic. But as you see in this chart, are used differently by different people from different backgrounds and different compass, etc. By the way, this graph is for the U.S. For those of you coming in from outside the U.S. from other countries, different countries have very different profiles. So that adds to the complexities. And of course, all of you have equivalents for your respective localities. As I mentioned, as I was also showing this graph on the right side, you see two things. One is big data and the question of data to support learning. Now I'm going to tell you this right now. In your roles, you are looking at a scenario where a lot of people are promising. Here's a magic solution, sometimes with AI as two letters on the magic solution. There aren't any. But as you move forward, as you're looking at how to use technology to both support the use of technology in the classrooms, but also support throughout the institution, how you start to think about constructing dashboards, using dashboards for data, etc. It's important. This is one example. As you heard already at the beginning, you're going to have all of these slides available to you in the email that will go out as the follow-up. So don't worry about where all of this is coming from. You have all the references you have on the links and so on. And the last one I have here is a little physical sensor that I built myself for about $5. And that became very useful during COVID because it can measure temperature, humidity. CO2 have made different versions of this. One can measure other contaminants, other questions. But that was an easy and inexpensive way in some of the schools I've worked with to keep track of airflow in a building. And again, this had two effects. One, it helped the school control the spread of COVID by knowing how well ventilated rooms, classrooms were. But two, it created a context where teachers and students could talk about what was happening and gain a measure of agency. Nobody could miraculously stop COVID, but at least they could say, okay, I understand what's going on and I understand what I can do for this. So this type of physical uses of technology is also a place where you can respond. So while these three types of domains, social media, big data, physical computing are all places where Black Swans can spring from. There are also places where responses to Black Swans can spring from. One of the questions in terms of the future of work is how jobs are split up. And again, I'm not going to get into the details of this right now, but as you're all thinking, and I know this, for instance, just look at the latest people who have signed in. We have technology integration specialists. We have curriculum coaches and so on. One of the things that is happening more and more is people's jobs are becoming segmented. So when you're working with teachers, you'll be looking at a present and future where you're looking more and more, not just a traditional team formation where everybody has kind of a monolithic role and then you bring them together as a team, but at places where roles are chopped up. And then that becomes a question of how you think about navigating that domain. And we'll go talk a little bit later than in this session about the type of teams you form. How do you create environments where that type of evolution of work is addressed rather than just hitting you with a Black Swans release expected? And finally, in terms of what people value and so on, we've seen some very interesting things coming out of the pandemic. For instance, one of these you've heard already that people want hybrid work. And this is the latest survey that I have with good data behind it from 2022. And one of the things about it is that when you compare where office occupancy is now to where businesses say they would like it, to what people would like, you have a source of tension. And everybody in your school is not different from that. In other words, this is somewhere where you want to be talking on an ongoing basis about how you might adjust things, how everybody, teachers, leadership, students can also use different hybrid modes, different forms of interaction to better accommodate what people's preferences would be. Because now they have shifted. It's not a question of, you know, this is just something that you just go back and that's it. It's the way it was. This really has been a shift. And similarly, if you look at the right hand side when you look at social inclusion policies, diversity policies, equity policies, people strongly favor these in the workplace. And that's also important because again, as you're thinking about how to scaffold learning models for teachers using technologies and so on. This is a good thing. This is something that tells you that you can work in terms of building good diversity equity initiatives that reflect both how the teaching is provided to students, but also how that's implemented among your staff. And it is not just something that just happens. This is something people are actively seeking. It's an actively good aspect of a workplace. So those are the ones I'm not going to spend more time on these because I really want to get to the point of having you be able to get your hands on some of the tools for making the response to these six nesting grounds for black swans happen and happen in a way that even if a black swan, you're very lucky and for instance, you never get hit with a flood, never get hit with a drought, never get hit with any kind of event. Nonetheless, the work you did already makes your institution. And the fragile because for instance, these are the topics that I was asked to talk about recently at a conference in Stockholm and you know is that all of these are aspects of things that your school will be dealing with so forget about black swans. Forget about all of that. If you respond using technology in the ways that we're talking about that we're going to see how to scaffold in just a minute, then you'll be able to respond to the world that these topics represent. And again, if tomorrow we have a session for those of you who'd like to engage in a conversation among all of you and with teachers or we're going to bring leadership and teachers together in that group. Okay, we can talk some more about how some of these have specific impacts upon leadership teachers topics to be taught how they're taught, etc. But this just gives you a taste of what anti fragility, making an institution and the fragile brings to the table. What you can do if you implement some of these tools for technologies and learning. I've told you what a big driver is right now. A big driver is that we be in better shape to deal with black swan events that we be not just in better shape to deal with black swan events where we build a kind of anti fragility that enriches what we can do. Quick comment here because I want to emphasize something that just went in the chat. Please, please, please questions. Bring them up if we can't get to them today because of time constraints. Don't worry. I have already promised the seesaw team that I will look at any list of remaining questions and answer them either tomorrow by writing or record something depends on the question what's most appropriate, but please don't hold back on questions. So let's talk about building anti fragile institutions and the role that you yourselves play as leadership in this context. Many of you have different roles. But I think what I'm about to discuss in one way or another relate to all the roles I've seen going by in the chat and that I've seen people describe when signing up or contacting me about this session. So the same model. It was already mentioned. I know many of you know it. I saw some people mentioned it in the chat again. Some people have emailed me about it and this session asking what I was going to talk about with Samar. So very briefly, for those of you who haven't encountered it, the Samarist model is a model for saying what makes a difference in using technology. And the idea is that you can start with technology just replacing something you did. What's the substitution now? Now that's great. That might make it easier or whatever, but it doesn't significantly have an impact on outcomes on what the results are of making that change. At the orientation level, you're doing something you're doing before, but you're enhancing it a little bit. You're making it a little bit better. And then you are beginning to see some effects, some impact of the use of the technology, the shift to the technology in there because of those enhancements. But the real payoff comes in what's called above the line when you go from those two enhancement levels to two transformation levels, when you start to really leverage the technology. So at the modification level, you're significantly redesigning a task using the technology. You're now not just saying, hey, let's do what we did before I leave it the same way. You're saying, well, hold on. I used to do this for these reasons, but maybe there are these other reasons I would always have liked to do this that now I can bring in with the technology. I'm going to work through an example in just a minute so you can see this more fleshed out, but I'll just cover the basic lexicon. So we're all on the same page. And then redefinition is where you say, you know what, I used not to do this at all because I just couldn't do it. Maybe it was something I couldn't accomplish with my students at all, or something I wanted to measure that I couldn't measure at all, or some type of staff activity that I could never do at all. All of those are possibilities. Well, at the redefinition level, it's going to say, hey, wait a second, the technology now does allow you to do that. Or you did something that you weren't terribly happy with at all. So you just replace it with something new in part or in whole that the technology makes available. And that's really where the biggest payoff comes in. And one of the things that I'm seeing in the data coming in from schools during the pandemic is that the schools that were best able to deal with the pandemic, the ones that this demonstrated either very robust resilience or antifragility in terms of how they went through the pandemic are the ones where technology was already being used at these two upper levels to a significant degree prior to the pandemic. So that's something to keep in mind. Let's now look at a concrete example. And I'm going to do it focusing on something that became crucial in the pandemic and you've already heard me talk about. And that's the whole idea of hybrid learning. Right. Hybrid learning is learning where either location or resources or content can be with the student at the school remote. In other words, there's not it's not all the learning resources in one place, all the home resources in another. In other words, the learning can occur if we define a hybrid mode of learning as some students are remotely online. Some students are face to face some instruction takes place synchronously. And some of the students that shift may shift either predictably or unpredictably depending upon context learning and so on. This is there's not a single recipe at one extreme you'd have traditional face to face instruction at the other extreme you'd have all remote and in between you'd have different mixes. You might have some mixes where all the students which ones are remote which ones are face to face are predictable. And sometimes you might have more unpredictable mixes. So all of these are possibilities. But one of the things we can say is okay, but how do we do a really good job using hybrid modes of learning? And here's where Samar comes in. So let's take it step by step at the substitution level we used to do just face to face instruction. And now we can say, well, hold on, let's use whatever tool we're using, whether Zoom, Google, video tools, teams, whatever it is you're using. Use it to provide robust telepresence. Now this means that instead of seeing the students face to face, you're replacing it with seeing the students remotely. But here's one of the things I always emphasize about substitution. You replace one for the other, but that doesn't mean you're making a carbon copy of one for the other. So one of the things we learned during the pandemic was it's better if you have more pulsed presence on Zoom than you would in the classroom. In other words, just asking students to just be in front of the screen nonstop is not the best way to use Zoom as a substitutive tool for face to face and develop and how those pulses work, what the students did in between pulses, where you have them be in one context versus another. Very variable according to institution, educational level and context. But nonetheless, you're still looking at a substitution type level. So it's replacing one with the other. A, don't see major impacts upon learning outcomes from it, but it was crucial, of course, to have this during the pandemic. At the augmentation level, you start to say, well, what can students start to do? What can be enhancements of what they would do in class? So you might have students work, as I'm showing you here in this diagram, for instance, on a concept mapping class. But in class, you might just do that as say, OK, over the next half hour or next 20 minutes, whatever time span you're using, everybody get together in teams to work on these concept maps. But the idea of hybrid learning with that synchronous versus asynchronous is, in fact, something that you can now say, well, I can enhance this because I can have some students work at it. And one time I can have two different teams interact with it in different ways at different times. In other words, the hybrid nature allows you to still keep the same task. You're building a concept map around certain ideas, but you're actually enhancing it in different ways, making it a bit better by virtue of that hybrid axis, the different times and types of axis you can have and so on. And that's why I'm calling this a conceptual space because it goes from just being an object because the map we're all working on in class to being an object that's shared in this online space as a concept space that students can interact with. So this is an enhancement. This is at the augmentation. It's a functional improvement, but the test still remains pretty much the same as before. So this is one of the key elements that gets us to that first half about to push above the line. Okay. One of the things that you have is at the modification level. You can now say, well, what can I start doing that they wouldn't have done before. Remember what I was talking about earlier with things such as scaffolding different types of teamwork and so on? Well, that's exactly what you can look at here where the hybrid learning says, okay, you say you're a technology integrator working with teachers to discuss the possibilities here. And to see what can be done, you can say, well, look, you don't have to have just the same traditional team structures. Why fluid team structures? Why? Because, for instance, you can have, if it's synchronous, you can have in many of these tools, you have rooms, and you can have the students move among rooms in ways that you really couldn't probably do physically in a classroom because you might not have the physical space. It might not be, you know, advisable for a student to go from one building to the other if they're a very young student to meet with a different group, etc. You can also have these teams that form over time in more plastic ways that allow you to address things. So you might say, well, I see the student has been working very well with these students, but there's an aspect where the type of team work they've been doing is not addressing their best skills as an aha. What if they also work with this other team in this different way? These are modifications to team tasks that were difficult or impossible to achieve prior to the use of the technologies that allow for this hybrid asynchronous mode. And now this allows you to start going to the modification where you're beginning to see a significant impact. And again, this is something we saw during the pandemic, where we saw teachers start to experiment, particularly for students that have been challenged in traditional classrooms to find spaces for their learning. They suddenly start to blossom in this. And this is a story by way that many people in the media don't seem to like to pick up the good news stories of students that really found a space where they could say, wait, I can now work in teams in ways I didn't do before with, you know, really thoughtful teachers, technology integrators, principles, etc. That made all of that possible in all of that. I found every definition is where you can say, well, what type of new tasks become available that weren't before. And one of the possibilities is when you say, well, what if you have students bringing in things from different spaces. So here I've taken one of many possibilities, which is to say you have a student at school working to make something using physical computing in this case a musical instrument that will accompany something that a student is presenting from there to a missile because they can't go to school. Or this is not when the day when they're going to be face to face. They're in the mode mode for that day. And they're sharing something live from a space that matters to them as well. And together that's in the creating something that they see as important, beautiful. It could be a performance. It could be a discussion of what's going on in the space. But there's something new. There's something that we couldn't do in our having without the technology. We can't have those two students do something live shared in a single space. And this is where we go to redefinition because it allows new possibilities, new opportunities that you couldn't have had before that are powerful. And again, we saw this happen during the pandemic to we saw students share aspects. You know, we heard we all heard the funny stories about the cat that walked in front of the camera or the little sibling that said they want candy right in the middle of somebody. You know, one of the students giving a talk, etc. But there's also this type of story as well, which also has to do with how a student interacts with the space, presents their space. In some cases presents challenges about their space. And that's a pre-definition. So these are, this is, if you will, a sequence, a summer sequence derived from what we saw happen, what we did during the pandemic that talks about best practices. But let's keep going. For those of you who are familiar with Samir, you've already seen this for those of you. So I'll ask you to be just bear with me for one minute while I show it to the people who have not. When I talk about impact, what type of thing am I looking at? And this is all derived from the work of Dr. Tameem and their team. And these are studies that met the studies that comprehend it all of 1097 studies over 19 years. And what I did in turn was take with my team, take Dr. Tameem's work and say, can we look at each of these by categories and see at what summer level the use of technology and learning occurred. So that's what Dr. Tameem was looking at and see what the impact was. And this is one example. I have dozens of these, but this is one of the ones, for instance, just because many of you care about reading performance. And this is what you see. Substitution, on average, the effect size and the effect size is a measure of the impact of something based upon a common standard deviations from your previous meaning is negligible or close to zero. If augmentation is small, you roughly double it at modification. And while noise also increases, you roughly double it on average at pre-definition. And this is the pattern that you see. This is a more recent study that wasn't included in Dr. Tameem's original study, but since then has been added to the set, which is a meta study on specifically the use of tablets and education. And you see the same pattern emerge. So when people ask me, so, okay, fine, you say it's better. Well, how much better? Well, this is the measure of how much better. And all of you in leadership need to have this information because obviously you're making a decision, right? How much time, effort, etc., to invest in these shifts, in these changes. And indeed, this is where, if you want to say, why is it that we saw those schools that were using significant chunks of their technology at MRR levels be the ones that had the best outcomes, if you will? Throughout the pandemic, you can see that it's this progressive doubling that makes the big difference between the first two and the last two levels. Very briefly, again, before the next example, a way to classify, a way to think about technologies. Because you say, well, okay, Ruben, you told me about all the level significance technology, but I'm supporting teachers. And I'm going to tell them, look for this, but there are thousands of tools out there. And we've all seen this, right? You say to teachers, go and look for an app and they drown. And frankly, if you haven't been doing this for a while, it makes sense. You're looking at thousands of things, I don't even know. Which ones matter? Which ones don't? Which ones make a difference? Well, this is another body of research that I carried out based on the work of the Verizon project. It says, look, there are five categories of technologies that you can use as a roadmap for which categories matter. Each category, there may be different apps, different tools, et cetera. But the categories already allow you and your teachers to focus on what matters, how to deal with it, and so on. And the five categories are social mobility, visualization, storytelling. I'm going to go through them very quickly. I'm not interested today in going into each one. You can do a lot with each one. You can talk about what happens in the classroom with each one. Right now, I just want to have them as categories so we can use them to think and talk about things. So social tools are the tools we use to create things jointly, share what we create, discuss them, et cetera. So, of course, it includes all of social media, but it includes elements such as shared document creation, et cetera. Mobility tools refer to the fact that the devices that we're using, it's not just that they're not plugged into a wall 24-7. Ironically, I am giving today's talk, doing today's session from an iMac that is plugged into a wall, but it's a bit of a rarity because normally I use a more portable device. And the devices that our students use and that most teachers use and that you use are mobile. So they can be used anytime, any place in the world that is scaffold for that type of hybrid learning that I talked about before. That's important. But it's also scaffold for things like that physical computing I was talking about, whether it's the sensor or the musical instrument, et cetera, that the student was using in the example I gave you. Visualization refers to the fact that we work with our students with abstracts, abstract concepts. And again, you're working with teachers and they say, look, I'm teaching history. I cannot get my students to understand how this event led to that event and this event preceded that event. They see that event. They have sort of a mush of events and dates in their minds. But I wanted to understand. They're going to say, well, hold on. What you're asking students to understand is an abstract concept in time, a sequence of what's in time. What if we use a tool designed to make that visible, tangible? And that's a tool like a timeline for visualizing time. Or if what's happening is a difficulty in understanding concepts in space, a map, concepts in number, simulations, tools for visualizing number, graphs, charts, et cetera. Tools also for visualizing connections between texts. So work maps, sequence tools that allow you to visualize. And even tools for visualizing the connections among things. If you're connecting concepts, they're called concept maps. If you're connecting animals in an ecosystem and plants and so on, it's a food web, et cetera. But all of these tools, and I just mentioned these five categories because they tend to be salient in the work most teachers do. All of these tools do the same thing. So take an abstraction, particularly one that the student might find challenging and make it tangible, make it visible in two or three dimensions for the students to work with. Storytelling. Lots of areas. We can tell stories with everything from pure images all the way to game-like interactive fiction, movies in between and so on. Why does storytelling matter? Well, storytelling matters because when I tell a story, I'm making sense for somebody else. But when I make some or somebody else, I make sense for myself. And that's why storytelling is a powerful tool. So again, this is one of the things where I encourage people to say you're working with teachers, encourage them to work on finding ways to tell stories in their domain. And then you can work with them to see what's the most appropriate technology. Maybe the most appropriate technology may wind up being plain old paper and pencil. That's fine. But the idea of storytelling and realizing that it can be used to integrate concepts to make sense of concepts is an important one. And it's both for self and for others. And finally, the idea of games. And people say, oh, games are useful because they're fun. Well, the fun aspect, don't get me wrong, it's there. But it really is because when a game doesn't set up a challenge and then a student can find a motivation, a drive for their learning in the context of that challenge. And that drive, the drive to I want to beat the game. I want to resolve this challenge can help drive the associated learning with the game. Again, many more things that could be said here. But these are the five categories. And these are, as I've just told you, some of the key things. Once again, remember you've got to have these slides. Many more things. But for now, just keep them in your mind as we're talking about how to help teachers, how to scaffold the work that teachers do, how to work to develop the community of practice. Talk more about that in just a couple of minutes among your teachers, how to do all of that, how these technologies then would play different roles in that context. All right. Briefly, one more thing. We're doing this. Thank you at this point to the CSOL team for facilitating, for making this possible today. And I want to emphasize something about CSOL that's to me very important. A lot of people think of CSOL as just something that they use in the classroom. And that's, you can use it in the classroom. That's fine. It's a great tool. If you think of it though more as a sort of filing cabinet, it's got, well, you put the assignment here and then the student puts the photo or the text document here and you put the link here. I recommend that people think of it more as two things. One, within the classroom as a learning management system. And I have these two screens here just to illustrate that point that here I've got, for instance, the blogging aspect together with the possibility of using messages, discussion, et cetera, to support this type of social interaction. Not just as a dump everything in one place, but as a place to say, well, how do conversations with different type of team working occur? And on the right hand side, then you see all the different items. And now think of those five categories I told you about of tools. And it's because of, well, how are some of those uses supported by this? If you're thinking about how to scaffold the work that is being done in CSOL by your teachers, how would you encourage them to not just look at it as photo, a picture? That's it. Drawing, a picture that somebody drew. That's it. But actually look at them with storytelling in mind. Or if the drawing reflects in some way something that's not so much a drawing as it is the output of is something that somebody is sketching for understanding an abstract concept in math, how to view that or in photo to take a screenshot, et cetera. So all of those possibilities and thinking about them in terms of how these elements aren't just a thing that you put there, but how they scaffold all of this. And the other aspect, that was CSOL within a classroom. But also think of CSOL as something that can be used to scaffold the work that teachers do and that you do with teachers. There's no reason. None. That you can't say, hey, we're going to do professional development and I'm going to show you one way of doing it in just a bit. And we're going to use CSOL as the medium for doing it, not just in the classroom, but also among all of us as a team because it works really well for that. So think of it again, not as a content management system. The file drawer, you stick stuff in. That's a learning management system. So that scaffolds learning. All right. So let's keep going then because I want to show you how to build a SAMR lab. And I realize many of you are familiar with SAMR, but this is a way of working with people who may not be familiar with SAMR in the work that you're doing and bringing them to doing this. And there's four steps to this. First, you have the teacher select a unit of instruction. Don't do the whole course. Just do one unit. And then redesign the intro to the unit at the substitution level. The development of the unit. Okay. What's going on after you've set the intro, the ground and material zone, the development of the unit. You do that first at the augmentation and then the second half of the development of the unit at the modification. That's not exactly precise, but just to give you an idea, it's a progression from first part of the development to second part of the development from augmentation then to modification. And then you save the culminating experience. Okay. The final, hey, how does the student fit all of this together, put something together with its approaches? Do that at the redefinition lab. Okay. There's nothing magical about this. There's nothing that says you couldn't do the beginning at redefinition and the next bit that augmented. There's nothing magical. But for a teacher, this is comprehensible. You start with the easiest in both the, okay, I know the students need to know this. It's also the simplest in technology and you build up hence the idea of a ladder. Okay. Something you're climbing up to develop your technology. And this is what you're hopefully helping them scaffold. And at each stage, these are the things that you should be working with a teacher. You should be asking them if they say, hey, I'm stuck. Can you come help me? Or they should have these in their mind. These are the three questions that you should ask. First, which unit of instruction would you like to redesign? And why? Three hours. Okay. Number two, what do you do before in this unit that worked and why did you do it? I mean, we assume that it's not a, you know, this is somebody that has had some success with this. It may not be great. It may not be the best thing. And I've referred, but they did do something before that they did for some reason. And finally, the question is, will you like to change or replace and why? Maybe it was because it wasn't successful because it was, because they'd like it to be more successful. Whatever it is, there's got to be a reason for it. So let's do an actual example. As soon as I'm doing here a unit, this is in the middle to high school level. Okay. But the same process can be adapted to any age group you like on ecosystems, biology and evolutionary processes in the context of ecosystems. Okay. There's again, I know what we've got people. I notice we have people from Argentina, from New Zealand as well, joining us. So very, very, very where this comes in at which level, but any system in any country as this at some level, I'm talking about it right now in a sort of what in the US would be, you know, middle school through high school, typically type of level. But I can easily be adjusted or adapted to other topics. So substitution. What am I going to do? I'm going to set the ground for what's the basic knowledge that students need about ecosystems and associated processes such as systems in ecosystems. Right. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to replace the traditional textbook with an e-book in this particular case. I'm using the book that was sponsored by your Wilson who suddenly passed away recently. And was funded and you can get it because it's a very rich up to date book. It's also free. So no cost. And it's a completely research based. In other words, it isn't, it's written by people who do research and who understand how that research matters, but also matters to somebody who might be a child who doesn't have the knowledge that the researchers do. So it's a very, very richly textured book. It goes well beyond the traditional textbook has is which we illustrated. And at the same time, I'm going to use other sources. So for instance, the creative layer running exchange specializes in this particular unit in terms of thinking about systems. Have you get students thinking about things like feedback groups? Okay. Sometimes students think of ecosystems as sort of one directional things. And why do I want to change this? Well, I want to change this because my textbooks were expensive out of date, not really responsive to what science is telling us about ecosystems and reading helps shape all this. So that's the why, but still it's straight substitution. I'm just replacing the traditional textbook with these new resources. Augmentation. Now that I set the groundwork, now we're going to develop the unit. The first part I'm going to do is to develop the key components that make up systems. And here I have three apps. Each of them relates to one aspect. The first one relates to the aspect of understanding systems, feedback loops, before loops, how things, you know, if a type of situation where you say, well, if I have rabbits eating grass and the rabbits are being eaten by foxes, what's the whole system looking like? Well, you have that. And then the second tool relates to the aspect of connections. So you think about food webs. And again, most textbooks, if you say, why would I want to replace the traditional textbook approach? Because the traditional textbook oversimplifies food webs to a point where they make no sense. And you need students to have it visualizable in a way in which they have tools to simplify what they see, but also increase the richness. And this particular tool allows them to see the networks of food webs and say, OK, let me take a big picture approach. Oh, I get it. OK? Visualization of connections, right? That abstraction of the food webs becomes tangible. They can play with. And then finally, a question of saying, when you put these two things together, systems of food webs, or you get out, and these are simple system simulations. So at the augmentation level, what I'm doing is I'm replacing all of that portion where the students would have seen just a couple of simple videos, a couple of illustrations. But I'm enhancing it because I'm giving them tools to explore this a little bit more, even as the concepts and the sequence of concepts I'm looking at remains the same. So it's an enhancement, but I haven't yet changed it. Why did I do this? That was the other question on that set, because I found that the type of buildup that the students did blocked them from further knowledge because it really just gave them something to memorize. This is the food web for a boreal forest, whatever it is. As opposed to, well, why do we care when we're talking about stewardship of the environment? What we do, which species we choose to protect, how and so on, what we might or might not do, where we might or might not have agency to fix things. Modification level now says, okay, I want to change things. Now, at this point, normally you just give the students an exam and you're done for the day, et cetera, in the traditional presentation. But I want the students to make it theirs. Remember what I told you about agency? We found over and over and over again during the pandemic that when you said, where are students and teachers healthiest and believe me, this was an imperfection. It was completely without impact in terms of mental health. But where were they healthiest in places where they had the most agency? So the question of agency comes to the foreground as something you would like to foster. And in particular, when you talk about the, why do you want to redesign this at the modification level? It's because you want to have students have agency over that. So students can use tools. And it is important for them to use these tools younger rather than by the time they get to college. So hence middle to high school, like Google Scholar to research the literature. And one of the good things about Scholar, by the way, is you'll get the literature. But you also get a lot of explanatory articles. You'll get a lot of things that you're not just looking at a paper that only a specialist in the field could read. You will get something, but you also get a whole constellation of things around it that can support teachers supporting the students exploring. And in fact, you supporting the teacher if they're saying, well, where would I help my students find the information? You can also do this even if you're not a specialist in the subject. And at the same time, tools that are simply enough for a student to use, but modifiable enough that they can start to ask a question about, now this is a system I care about. Can I modify it so I can explore, ask a question about it? Are we looking for our students to make the next Nobel Prize winning thing? No, it'd be great if they did, but that's not it. But at this level, the use of the technology scaffolds a student being able to explore a topic in a way they could not have without the technology. This is a modification still of the task. It is something that we might have asked the student to do before, create a report, et cetera, but it's a significant modification because we're including agency into the picture. Finally, at the redefinition level, okay, this is the one that's now is the culminating experience. Well, if modification was doing the research and starting to explore, redefinition has to be the communication of that to an audience. And this is where things like social media allow your student to have an audience that's a real audience. In the past, there have been a presentation to their classmates or don, that's it, or the science fair. But now you have a possibility to reach out to a broader audience for your student to get feedback from that audience. And this is a new task in this hybrid world that was previously inconceivable. Unless you happen to be so lucky as to have a school in a place with researchers that happen to share your students' interests, who happen to be available on that day to come in and, you know, the stat list. It just didn't happen, right? But now you have something that can be left asynchronously for other people to provide feedback on to scaffold. And yes, you do have to do some scaffolding. Here's where you're working with teachers in your roles as leadership to help them work through how you help scaffold that responsible audience, that reaching for a responsible audience for your student. And that takes you to the redefinition level. It's a new task. Your students, it's not that a student could have done a presentation before without the computer, but it's that the audience, the feedback, the wise, the workforce change dramatically. So that's the SAMR level, and that's the process and the type of questions you need to be asking and what you're looking for at each point. I will mention that the ladder I just showed you was also designed in response to some parameters that came out of research sponsored by the Gates Foundation and that have to do with success of students as they progress through the later years of secondary school as well as the transition to college, as well as the transition to jobs. So that particular example is not just, you know, only because of that it has additional motivations behind it, but that need not be the case. I just mentioned that, you know, why that particular example in that particular context. So as I say, why build a ladder? Well, it's not the only one, but I keep coming back to the key advantages. It's closest to teacher practice and you start to diverge from current practice as you go through the unit. It's sustainable. You don't have to have the teacher do everything. You say, well, why don't we just start with the introduction and then the rest we leave more, you know, let's do mostly substitution, a little bit of augmentation. That's fine. We'll plan for those for next year and so on, but it's sustainable. It's not something we're asking everybody to do everything all at once. And you have to say this option for gradual implementation, where you plan on and say, well, I've realized I want to get to this by year three of doing this, but, you know, I don't have to do this. Cynthia, I know it's just typed into the chat that start with a unit they don't really enjoy teaching and needs a reboot. Absolutely. Cynthia, in fact, you know, these are three of the things I recommend and yours is exactly along those lines too, because that's exactly it. But if you don't enjoy teaching it, well, let's think about it exactly that a reboot. How do you rethink this, right? And I also recommend a few others, you know, pick something that you're passionate about, but you're not thinking that that passion gets across. Or is there something blocking your students' progress? The topic they always get stuck on, okay? Or what students will do in the future? What do you think is going to be most valuable for them in their next educational experience, when it's the next grade or the next institution, say, if they're going on to college or their job, whichever it is. So these are three more, but I agree with you, Cynthia. So thank you for bringing that up. You know, if there's something they don't enjoy teaching, absolutely, that's another great place to start. All right. One last thing then, before we wrap up, which is what I just showed you for teachers and their practice in terms of what they do in the classroom, also applies to you and working with professional development. Because one of the questions I get about professional development is how do you make professional development sustainable? And you can do this by using a similar approach. So at the substitutional level, you extend traditional professional development with things such as online resources, online books, online webinar recordings, et cetera. Substitution for traditional, you know, the books or whatever it is you are getting for professional development, but still very valuable. It sets a stage for augmentation, where your more experienced teachers or you in your role as a learning designer, technology integrator, et cetera are doing peer coaching as professional development. So as a teacher is creating a new unit of instruction, what you're seeing here is a teacher, for instance, creating a new unit in math and creating videos that you as their peer coach or another teacher as their peer coach will be able to say, well, here, let me highlight this. That's why you've got a little circle around that. Your use of the measuring device here is a good idea, but here's where students get stuck. And then let me connect it to, and for instance, here you see a diagram related to learning standards for math in the United States. Let me connect this to the learning standards. So it becomes a conversation. You use the online medium, the teacher that's creating their unit of instruction, trying it out with students, putting videos up, commenting what worked for them, what worked for you to provide feedback on for other teachers to provide feedback on. Think about using CSOM for this conversation, to scaffold it, and then contextualizing it using some of the resources and derived resources that you already looked at in terms of institutionalized. Augmentation and enhancement to professional development. I'd set the stage for that modification, saying, okay, now let's have the teachers go the next route. And this is a place where some schools, some institutions are comfortable going, others are not, and that's fine. Some teachers are comfortable, others are not, and that's fine. But if you are, it can be a huge change because you talk about saying, not just how I changed that unit of instruction, but saying, here's a bigger topic. Here's a challenge for my students, maybe in math, maybe in language. I was recently working with a team on English, students who are not a, whose first language is not English, so language learners and some of the specific challenges that crop up in that context, et cetera. All of these are topics for action research. So research that isn't just because you got to publish a paper, but because you're going to change, transform your classroom practice. And at the modification level, this type of sharing, et cetera, can now be used as the basis for conducting the research. So those examples that the peer teacher mentors, et cetera, technology integrators, designers all commented on, now become the process for say, well, I did this with this group of students and I saw these outcomes. So let's discuss this and see what we all get because we're all thinking here as an action research team. And again, some institutions, this will work well with some institutions, may decide that this is not necessarily where they want to go. But this is a particularly powerful avenue for professional development because there's this agency, if you're going to say this once again, motivation for the teachers. And finally, obviously, as we did before with the students, what's good in this case for students, it's also good for teachers sharing this out, share with a broader community. At the redefinition teachers, you used to be able to say, what's my budget for sending teachers to a conference for them to get results out. And that was always in any school, any district I've ever worked with, anywhere in the world, it was never an infinite budget. It was nice if it was large, but never infinite. Well, now you can talk about reaching a broader audience and wider audience, getting more feedback from other teachers, et cetera, via social media. So at the redefinition level of this scaffolding for teachers' professional development as an ongoing, sustainable effort, this sharing out with a broader audience becomes a portion of it. So digital storytelling as professional development. And that is something that I keep going back to, if you think of CSOS, a learning management system, cannot be scaffolded within CSOS. So you don't have to spend a lot of money on additional tools, social technology, you've already got it. You can already use it and use that as the basis for how this professional development is guided, developed. One last thing, in terms of what we wrote that. So I showed you how to use SAMR, both to help guide what happens within a classroom, also to help guide what happens across professional development at Tech Quintet for what you might reach to. One last thing is closing the loop. And I want to come back to this because sometimes teachers tell me they come back to me and they say, I did this and it worked well, but I didn't hear anything else. And that's important because just like we think that formative assessment is essential for students when we close the loop, when we give them feedback. It's also important for the teachers themselves to receive this feedback. And I don't mean in the form of a job performance review or something like that, which of course happens. That's a separate thing. But to have this ongoing conversation and you're noticing the professional development scaffolding, if you will, that I mentioned earlier, that's built in. But whatever you choose to do, think of the feedback in your role as leadership to the teachers as being analogous to this definition of formative assessment by Black and William, which is where you use evidence about replaced student achievement with accomplishment, achievement, improvements in outcomes in the classroom. And then think about how that informs what comes next. And again, because that's the type of feedback that I frequently hear from teachers that they wish they got more off and they frequently feel that they got told, well, good job and that's it. But that's not it. This is more the question of how you close the loop and close the feedback loop. One last thing. So if your teachers will be innovators, so if your teachers will be there at the front, others will be opinion leaders, some will be in different forms of the majority and some will come in at the end. And people always ask me, oh, what do you do with the ones at the end? I say, listen, just because they're not early adopters of the technology doesn't mean they can't be a part of a technology using a technology forward community. You need to bring them in. And this is my last slide. I need to bring them into the idea of a community of practice. So a community of practices where people share. So they may not be bringing to the table what all the other teachers that are using C's or digital storytelling tools or visualizing tools are, but they're bringing something in the context of how students, they're bringing in something in the context of how students and how the overall community of teachers and that student learning is occurring that is valuable. So this is the last point I want to make because I also get used as this, you know, as this question, which is, what do I use to bring these people on board? I say, well, sometimes just a gentle persuasion of being in a community of practice where other teachers will do it, but even if they never come on board, look to what they bring that is of value to the table and how to build it in. Because at the end of the day, the key thing is how you use the tools, how you use the technology to build an institution that is fruitful, more enjoyable to work with, and ultimately, as I said at the beginning, antifragile. There's some additional resources that will be available to you with these slides, and it's my contact info. So I thank you all for coming. I realize we are right at the end of our time. I apologize, I run just a touch longer than I hope to, but please, if you can stay, I'll answer questions. And if you can't, please don't worry, the recording will be available, and I'll also make sure to answer anything else via text or another recording later. So... Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. Thank you, Reuben, for sharing all of that great knowledge on learning technologies in SAMR. Yes, like Reuben said, we do understand we are at time, so if you have to go, we do understand. However, we're going to stay on just a few more minutes. We're going to take a few questions. If we don't get to your question, please follow up in an email. And we also, as we mentioned and dropped in the chat, we have a Q&A, a follow-up Q&A discussion that Reuben will be facilitating tomorrow. You can register for that as well. And as a reminder, this session is being recorded. So if you do have to pop out, you will receive the recording, and you won't miss anything. So let's go ahead and just take a couple of questions before we wrap up. So here is a question from Lee Nelson. To what degree have you seen SAMR implemented at the elementary level? It seems many of your examples were focused on middle and high school projects. CSAH users trend towards elementary where learners are much less self-directed. Do you have any elementary level SAMR examples using CSAH or digital tools? All right, great question. So the answer is first to a degree. I've actually seen it implemented about equally across levels. I've seen it most implemented at middle school, but that has nothing to do with the model. It has to do with the fact that one of the biggest places to start for the model was the main learning technologies initiative, and that started in middle school. So a lot of the early research, which is related to not just what I showed from the research done on Tamim's work, but other research was done at the middle school. So a large number of the examples come from that body, but in terms of actual sustained use, I've seen it used about equally across all levels. If you look, for instance, in the slides I put together yesterday for teachers, one of the slides was oriented towards pre-K to elementary, and the second one was elementary to middle. So those are examples. I also have other examples, and I'll be happy perhaps to send along another set of slide decks with examples oriented towards elementary and as I say, early education. One last question when people ask me why I tend to choose middle school. Aside from the connection to main, I find it's easiest to speak with a broad range audience, such as this one, when I'm talking about those topics, because they don't necessarily presume specialist knowledge. Sometimes when I'm talking about a topic such as, for instance, English language instructor for non primary, English as primary language learners, I have to get into some very specific questions and anybody who isn't familiar with the literature on the teaching of a second or nth languages will say what on earth are you talking about and it's not very interesting for other people. So that's the other thing. The most general examples that can be best understood by a general audience tend to be targeted at that range. Go to college, you get to specialized, go too much in the direction of basic reading instruction and again, you can get too specialized, but that all said and done, yes, I do have examples and it does work well. It also doesn't require necessarily a self-direction, although I will tell you that self-direction is a key feature of the most successful projects I've seen even with very young students. I'd be delighted, for instance, if you come tomorrow to discuss a kindergarten level project, which was incredibly self-directed, in fact, more so than many high school projects I've seen. And Ruben, you touched a little bit on this using those multimodal tools within CSAH for us to scaffold that learning for students or also for students to create, allowing them to really kind of reflect on their thinking and their learning and create in ways that they wouldn't be able to without that technology. So that is one way that CSAH can support SAMR for those higher levels. I think we'll take about one, I'll be, one more question and then, oh, go ahead and wrap up here. Oh, okay, I think we are at time. So, yes, if you have any more questions, we will follow up with them with a response via email and we also have that Q&A, but we would love to have your feedback on this session and how we can continue to cater these events to meet your needs. So we're going to drop a link. I see we've already dropped this in the chat to a feedback form. You can go ahead and complete that. It will also pop up when the webinar ends. So make sure that you go ahead and drop that feedback. We really appreciate it and we use that to provide you with further sessions like this. And also we have a resource for you and this resource defines how to redefine your classroom technology use with CSAH and SAMR. So it can touch a little bit more on that question that was just asked. So this resource can be found in the Handouts tab and we'll also share the resource in the follow-up email as well. So thank you everybody for joining us today. We really appreciate you, Ruben, for joining us and presenting all of this amazing information and sharing your knowledge with us. And we hope to see you again soon. And hopefully we'll see you tomorrow at the Q&A. Thank you, everybody. Goodbye. Bye-bye.