 Welcome everyone to session three. This is the CISA Tech Integrationist success series. Thank you so much for spending time with us. I'm Angela, I taught kindergarten for 15 years and I lead the community team at CISA. And I really wanna support all the work that you are doing as you support teachers in your buildings. You can find me on Twitter, I love to connect and chat. And if you're joining us for the first time in this series, what I would just encourage you to do is keep coming. But we really cover a variety of topics, focus on practical ideas and resources, and of course, connecting you with a community of colleagues that are kind of in the same boat as you are. We do this every the second Wednesday of each month. So if you're just seeing this for the first time, register and join us again or pass it along to a colleague if you found it beneficial as well. And you can get a certificate for joining this session. I am going to share a six character code during the session to get a recording or not a recording, a certificate after you view this recording if you are watching it on YouTube or via a followup email. So those of you live, as a reminder, you don't need to do anything, you're going to be all set with that information coming at you in an email. I'm so excited for today's topic, PD Ideas, for when you're short on time and budget. Now, this topic really was inspired by our community. I had surveyed lots of integrationists and said, what do you want to talk about? And this is something that came up several different times. So I've actually reached out and we have three amazing guests with us today. We have Adam, Michael and Andy and they're really going to run through some ideas that they implement and try in their own schools. So we're going to talk about experts down the hall, short PD sessions, offering choice in choice and format, and empowering students to lead and meeting teachers where they are. So without further ado, welcome Adam and Michael. Really honored to have you here today, sharing your experience and expertise. So let's just jump in, tell us a little bit more about you guys. Thank you and thanks for having us on. My name is Michael Medvinsky. I am an Instructional Technology Integrationist at University Liget School and also the Dean of Pedagogy and Innovation. So I have the honor of working with all teachers and learners pre-K-12 in our building. And I'm Adam Hullabuck. I'm Mike Sidekick. I teach upper school history primarily, but also serve as the Dean of Curriculum and Assessment. And so Mike and I work really closely together as program deans across all grade levels to integrate professional development and learning opportunities at University Liget School at Gross Point. Yay, we are so excited. So make sure you give Adam and Michael a follow. They'd love to connect on Twitter, of course, as well. Let's just get started with your first idea here. So for us, many of the teachers here have things that they are experts in or are developing and really excited to share. So sometimes the best PD is from the teacher down the hall and we wanna make sure that all of our teachers here feel valued and visible and sharing what they're doing in their classroom is just part of their day-to-day happenings. And so we have teachers here that are CSOL ambassadors. We have department chairs who lead their department in thinking and learning around a certain content area. We have cultures of thinking in each division and developing that daily five cafe strategies in our lower school and thinking about how we can implement that with our new readers, our tech and our makers also like to share the things that they're developing in their classrooms and thinking about beyond the technology side of things, just helping develop a community of teachers who may go down the hall to get a print and find a friend in the hallway and then stop and talk about an idea, develop something, create a connection and a partnership and learn something from their friend just in the hallway that sparks some excitement. They go back to the classroom, they try it and they have a relationship. Right, and really talking about not a lot of time or a lot of budget, a lot of these conversations started by taking maybe two or three minutes in a faculty meeting and just saying, hey, I wanna give a shout out to so-and-so for their work on CSOL and bringing this in and it just starts to pique colleagues' interests so that way they can have those conversations in the hall and really start to develop their professional learning networks but in person. And something that we enjoy talking about is bigger conceptual ideas, thinking about the ways in which we use different questioning strategies. That's not a division specific idea. You can think about asking probing and clarifying questions in a pre-K classroom, also in a fifth grade classroom, also in a ninth grade classroom, also in a seniors classroom and thinking about how we can continue that kind of professional discourse around all teachers, just starting with the faculty meeting and then ending up in a hallway conversation or during lunch or any time that they have to grow ideas. Yeah, and especially with those big ideas. Starting with the big ideas means then we can say, oh, with that big idea, have you tried CSOL? Have you tried other kinds of technology tools? Have you tried other kind of ways of incorporating that into your class and it makes for much more robust conversations and implementation really in the classroom? Yeah. Well, and I love that you started with this one actually because I think sometimes, if there's the mindset that we have to have someone from the outside come in or we have to send teachers away to X, Y and Z to really reap the benefit of innovating or trying something new. And I love that you're calling out, there are so many teachers just among your staff that really have a lot to offer. So I love that you're starting with that one. Me too. And none of us feel like we're experts in any area. But what we do find is that we are thought provokers and if we have a conversation, nobody has the answer. We may have the answer, we may offer a resource but nobody feels like they're the experts. So we feel like we're all growing together which really creates a community of sharing and learning and growing together. Everyone is welcome to contribute and everyone is kind of expected to contribute too. Which takes us to some professional learning we do have scheduled. And so something that we started a couple of years ago and really thinking about doing more of this year is short PD stacks where it's just a half an hour of time after school. I know we're talking about when you're short on time but if you can carve out a little bit of time together then you have some time to talk about specific things. And so we have these PD stacks like yesterday we ran a seesaw afternoon where we talked about the new updates and we talked about the Chrome extension and got teachers excited about it and how to use it. It was a playground time. It was a time for us to grow ideas around a certain thing. We have a community building around Halloween where all the lower school teachers make their Halloween costumes and we may learn to use something like a glow forge laser cutter or a silhouette vinyl cutter or something like that but we're all sitting around having fun and learning a new skill. We were cat in the hat and thing numbers one through 23 one year. We made our own T-shirts. We were scrabble pieces the other year and we cut the stencils and painted our own pieces of wood to be scrabble pieces. So there's so many opportunities for us to gather around one single idea short enough where people can say, oh, I can do a half an hour and then it goes from there. And really- I love that too. After a full day of teaching, right? It's like, I can squeeze in a half hour. Let's do it. Let's play and get energized. I love that idea. And really being conscious of that, that making it a half an hour. So teachers know it's not, well, it says a half an hour but it's really 45 minutes or an hour. Really sticking to that time has made for really thoughtful and efficient conversations in that time. Snacks always help too. Yeah, definitely. In addition to kind of the snacks, as it were the snack PD, we also have some year long cohorts that we run for volunteer groups of teachers. And these are also kind of short individual sessions but they go over a theme throughout the year. So for example, we hold a curriculum committee that's a volunteer group that really looks at, pedagogical and curricular ideas surrounding a mentor text. And so a lot of our groups, for not a lot of money, we've been able to find either a mentor text, like a book or an article to really focus our conversation on a topic. So for example, for last year's curriculum committee, we chose Understanding by Design by Wiggins and McTighe and really went through that text throughout the semester and we're able to build a unit of curriculum together and have really robust conversations around that text. Again, it was all internal PD. We didn't have outside experts other than the authors of the book, which were as fundamental and a foundational, awesome experience, but really going from that end. Another year long theme and has been for the last couple of years is Creating Cultures of Thinking. We've been fortunate to have Ron Richart visit Liget for the past three years, but we have lately, this year began by talking about expectations for and of learners and thinking about what are those cognitive expectations we have in our own classrooms. So everybody brings their own experiences in and we talk about it within the group. So again, there's nobody we bring in from the outside, but we do talk about certain concepts and how we can better serve our learning community. In the lower school, we've been talking about documentation of learning where some teachers have been kind of snapping pictures in CSAU and sending it home. Today we read this book and today we annotated this poem and thinking about how we can develop that into documentation for learning where learners are using CSAU to go back and reflect upon their previous posts. I used to think and now I think my thinking has changed because and I think that the multi-page addition to that is really going to be a catalyst for going back to previous posts, adding another page to it and reflecting on our own thinking. So it's been really great. Homework and grading, it's been a couple of year conversation. We still have some thinking to do around that, but we have thought about hacking homework by a friend's star and read that a bit and we're looking for a mentor text for diversity, equity, inclusion. So if anybody has any suggestions for a mentor text, please reach out on Twitter and let us know something you've had success with. Love it, can I ask one clarifying question because I love this idea. And when, are teachers selecting the topic that they're most interested in or are you kind of selecting and they're all joining in the same conversation? Oh, we offer multiple of these year-long cohorts throughout the year. And so teachers can self-select into really anything they would like to do. They can also offer suggestions for these year-long cohorts and we can get a critical mass around that, we'll do it. We also run ed camps throughout the year and the topics that seem to surface regularly at the ed camp tend to become our year-long cohort topics. Love that, thank you for letting me know about that. And monthly emails, tell us a little bit about this. So we have thought about how we can best curate some of the blog posts we read and some of the Twitter chats we do and our followers and the resources we gather from them. And so Adam and I have been thinking about how we can send out a once a month targeted learner engagement, authentic assessments, tech tips, anything around that, but curate a specific link to share, curate a specific follower that has been really vocal about a certain concept. We really enjoy sharing at Jotopia, MindShift, Cult of Pedagogy, TeachThought, the hashtags on Twitter like ED Chat, Seesaw Chat, Learner Engagement, all those that we curate ourselves, but to really just send something very focused and specific to our teachers. Yeah, it can be really overwhelming at times to get, if you belong to ASCD Smart Brief or any of these other kind of email services, they're great resources, but you know, in the teaching day, they can often fall through the cracks. And so our goal is to really focus everyone's attention on maybe one or two or three links in that email that staff can really go to and focus on and work with and hopefully collaborate with others on. Love that idea. We're just getting started. There's so much to talk about. I feel like we could just stop right now and just continue the conversation. So thank you, Adam and Michael, but we have Andy Leiser, also here with us, who has some great ideas on the topic. And before Andy starts to talk, I'm just gonna shout out the first three digits of the code you'll need if you're watching this recording to get the certificate. Those digits are four, three, eight. And with that, Andy, take it away. Hey, everyone. It is always a pleasure to hop in with Seesaw and share what we're up to here in Hastings, Minnesota. My name's Andy Leiser. I am the elementary integration specialist here in Hastings. I'm a Seesaw ambassador, Apple distinguished educator, but most importantly, I'm a dad and a husband. I have been in education for a little while. I taught 10 years in the East Bay, the Bay Area, California. So shout out to Benisha Unified over there. And this is my sixth school year as Hastings sole tech integrationist. And I work with three elementary schools. There's about, I don't know, 1400 students, 100 plus staff. So I never seemed to be in the right place at the right time. So I had to get creative on how do we meet all of the different needs that we have. We are a shared iPad classroom. We do have PC computer labs and Chromebook carts. So we've got the whole gamut of devices. Coffee's my fuel of choice. And actually I learned an awful lot about properly roasting coffee from Blue Bottle Coffee, which is out of San Francisco, in their online on demand videos and tutorials, which I thought was pretty awesome. You're gonna notice I'm attempting to use the new creative tools in Seesaw for my slides today. I hope that that goes off well because I believe really strongly in using the same tools our learners are using whenever and wherever possible. So it helps me think differently and find creative ways to showcase what we're doing here. So here's some of the stuff that we've been trying out in Hastings for the past few years. Some have been awesome. Some we're still learning and growing with. So with that said, no budget. All of this was just sort of organically free. Let's get into it. So in 2015, we established our iKIDS programs, our student tech team informed kids with incredible advice solutions. This was an idea that came back from one of our conferences here in the winter in Minneapolis. And a first grade teacher came back and said, why don't we do this? And I was like, all right, let's give it a go. So we started this pilot program one year and fourth graders were selected by their teachers who met sort of some qualities that we talked about. And we met once or twice a week during the recess portion of their lunch. Now, I'm not one to take recess away from children ever. So we made sure that the students agreed to the commitment that they wanted to be there and that we had the parent permission, it was all good. So I took time in the 15 minutes I had them to train them on any number of topics, device troubleshooting, settings, app flows, really anything that kind of came up. And they would be our in classroom experts or they were a phone call away to come into a more primary grades. These are fourth graders. So as the program kind of has evolved over the years, now they're applying via Google form. Now I take third and fourth graders. We had 180 some applications last year. We're about to open that application up again this year. And only 45 across the three schools are selected. So it is a life lesson in application reality. But what we have done has begun to expand beyond just sort of device maintenance and tutorials. We've moved into helping students and classrooms create content, create PSAs, to create their own videos. And we're modeling that with a weekly video newscast that this crew sort of spearheads. You know, we keep all our devices in top form. We still do all of the things that we used to do testing out new apps together and resources. We're committed to what we call our model of assistant inform where we, yes, come up with some solutions, but we also give you explanations on why. And this is all very student driven. A few years ago, we began using CSaw to connect the iKids at all three schools. It was fun to have them like hop in and see their friends like from T-Ball and gymnastics and everything. Oh, I mean, I know that person. And they would post questions to one another and help each other out remotely. It was actually pretty slick, so. That's awesome. I feel like we could do a whole topic on this, Andy, but I know you're so excited to share. Yeah, for sure. So one of the things that I started to do beyond what the iKids were doing was, you know, I was making all these videos and all of these tutorials and things and I geared them toward the teachers in my district. But I felt like, you know, if this is helpful here, this is going to be helpful really anywhere. So I began really thinking about how I shared that. And thanks to that kind of blue bottle coffee experience from San Francisco, how I learned kind of at my own pace and in a location that was most comfortable for me, I decided to take that model and kind of extrapolate that out here for our teachers to access and grow their own practice independently. So for some certain more sensitive content specific to our district, I keep it in Google Drive and share it out that way. And then for some of the stuff that I felt like, you know, more people would benefit from this. This isn't exclusive to us. I would try to put that out there onto YouTube because I feel it's really important to openly share our resources, things that will help build competencies and benefit learning anywhere. I mean, if it helps kids, I want to make sure that we do that. So I've published hundreds of videos and there's followers from all over the place that benefit from what we're doing here. And then I explored CESAW blogs, which was awesome. And we continue to use CESAW blogs as a way to share our content within that same platform our students are using. So our teachers are modeling it, we're sharing tips, tricks and highlight student work. This is where we host our Little Raider News that weekly news show that we produce and clips our kids produce. And CESAW is just a really great way to do that within the blog because we can share almost anything to our specific audience and beyond. So if you want to check it out, blog.CESAW.me slash Little Raider News. So this is brand spanking new. I've only done this a handful of times. So this is definitely something I almost didn't include, but I like to model sort of the process. And kind of like what Michael and Adam were saying about PD snacks, my pop-up PDs are probably a little bit more like a PD bite or like a fun-sized candy bar, which is my family culture. An appetizer maybe. It's an appetizer, yeah. But some folks love this, some really love to have their PD planned. But what I do is I set up shop in a high traffic area, usually like in the main hallway right outside the office and I pump some jams and I supply everything that's needed. And I just invite folks who are walking by to come try it out. It could be a student, it could be a parent, it could be a teacher, but I want to get people in and even I'll rope my daughter who's in there to kind of lead some things because our student experts are some of the most powerful voices we have. But most importantly, the idea is just to get in, have fun together and we do and then that sort of spreads and ideas sort of take root and I see them blossom in other places. So the idea of pop-up PD, just kind of getting in a big front and center area and just being there with something to draw them in is pretty fun and powerful. So Angela said, hey, you should maybe if we have some time share this, I love this and I need to do it more. But I wanted to share Google Meet, if you're not aware of it, meet.google.com is awesome. It is a device agnostic video chat that allows you to screen share to give demos, tutorials. I can connect through QuickTime, my iPad so I can show that screen. It is a lifesaver because I can't be everywhere at once but Google Meet sort of lets me in a way. So I share the link one time and I share my availability times and when it's that time, I just let it run in the background and when somebody joins, I get a little chime no matter where I am and it's fabulous. They have the screen sharing abilities and I just noticed and I think I included down there a really awesome accessibility feature on the fly live captioning, which is incredibly inclusive and you should check it out because I'm going to. But what I like about this is you establish sort of a digital place, your digital office hours and folks can come to you if they need it. You can see them, talk to them, demo things. It's pretty awesome. So I'd recommend you check that out. And I would be remiss if I did not mention the plethora of information that's in the CISA Help Center. If I don't have an answer to someone in the moment, this is where I go because I love, like they're step-by-step text guides. There's video tutorials and I don't have all the answers. So after like digging in and trying to find everybody else's questions, I began to say, you should really check out the CISA Help Center and helping them sort of figure things out for themselves. And it's been really awesome. So I encourage you to, if you're using CISA and I'd like to think that you are because you're here, share that, hey, look, you might find your answer in the CISA Help Pages and maybe suggest a keyword search. Instead of doing it for that way, we're empowering our staff, which then I hope they would in turn pass on to their students modeling that process. If that doesn't work, there's always help at CISA.me. So you can email in, but I've heard that's a pretty busy place lately. So... You know, it's just back to school, Andy. Oh, yeah. So anyway, the CISA Help Pages is total catch-all. Yeah. So the website is help.CISA.me for our Help Center, of course, if you're not familiar with that yet. And while you're thinking of your questions that you wanna ask Adam, Michael and Andy, I'm actually gonna show you a few more things. And here's, of course, how you can connect with Andy and I'll be sharing as well on our kind of final resting page, the contact information for Adam and Michael as well. But a couple of things I also just wanna throw your way. These are new resources that we have created to support you in supporting teachers. So thinking about being short on time, we actually have CISA training stations that we've created with the help of, you know, a couple amazing CISA tech integrationists. Shout out to Joni and Heather who helped in this process. But these are ready-made, ready-to-go. Each of these stations is about three to five minutes. So, you know, even if you've got a short time to meet with a teacher and you just wanna play, this would be perfect for a pop-up PD even as Andy talked about. So those resources are there for you as well as something that we call CISA Snapshots. So these are really quick ideas, CISA tips in printable form, hang them anywhere. Maybe they're in the workroom, lounge or restroom. And you can of course also send these electronically as well for teachers to really help them with various steps in inspiration in CISA. So I just wanted to mention those as well if you missed out on us talking about those in our last session. And of course, you are here right now in a free webinar, but we also of course have sessions for teachers. So this is where we house all of those sessions that are updated each month. So if you're thinking, oh my gosh, I can't possibly help all these teachers, we are more than happy to support you in doing some of that work for you in these sessions. And again, hopefully creating inspiration and sparking creativity in your classrooms as well. And even just pulling this session together, I really reached out to our tech integrationist group on Facebook to get their ideas and generate their ideas as well. So if you are not yet connected in that space, I highly encourage you to run there as well if you're looking to connect with more colleagues that are in a similar position that you are. So we are going to go into questions here live and I wanna just give the last three digits of the code. You'll need to get the certificate. If you're watching the recording, those digits are two, seven, one.