Maine Learning Technology Initiative

The annual MLTI Summer Institute is scheduled for July 24 – 26th at Bowdoin College in Brunswick. Like last year, we’ll continue to draw on the expertise of the MLTI Integration Mentors and content specialists who will share their knowledge and experience as they guide participants in an intensive three day immersion in the topic of choice from our list of Summer Institute Cohorts. This intensive structure is a departure from previous Institutes where a variety of shorter sessions exposed participants to brief experiences with topics.

Please visit our website to view the cohorts available.  When registering, you’ll select the cohort of your choice and spend the institute working with the same group in order to maximize the learning experience.  Each cohort is limited to 15 participants (unless otherwise stated), so don’t delay in registering!  Registration for cohorts will be first come, first serve but we will make our best efforts to accommodate everyone’s first choice. Please note on registration, there is an option to select a back up cohort!

Along with MLTI cohorts being offered, MLTI has joined forces with the Maine Cohort for Customized Learning to offer a cohort designed for school teams.  To learn more about this opportunity, please visit the cohort page. Costs associated with this cohort are slightly different due to extra meeting times schedule in the fall (FMI).

Want to attend but are looking to save some money on registration?  Here are some options for you:

1.  Submit a poster session proposal – save 20% if you are selected to present.
2.  Are you an ACTEM member or a teacher at an ACTEM institutional member school?  ACTEM is offering 40 $75.00 scholarships!

Online Registration

Learn more about the 2012 MLTI Summer Institute on our website

If you have any questions, please contact Juanita Dickson.

Economics is a subject that is generally given the lightest touch as part of a social studies curriculum, and yet an understanding of economic concepts can have some of the longest standing results in student’s lives beyond school. By incorporating a broader study of economics into curriculum beyond a social studies classroom, students will be able to create and stick to a personal budget, follow and predict fluctuations in stock and land prices, develop business plans that are sustainable and understand how economic practices influence international development. Economics is an important part of every student’s education, and every teacher can play a part in developing economic understanding.

This webinar will look at tools on the MLTI image and online that can support the teaching of economics. From personal finance to global economic indicators, there are many ways in which digital tools can build an understanding of concepts such as supply and demand, input and output and economic development. While this is not intended to be a comprehensive view of an economics curriculum, it will point the way to developing an engaging method of incorporating the subject into schoolwide teaching and learning.

To join the webinar, click on the Webcasts tab above and follow the links to register.

Image by images_of_money on Flickr. Used under a CC BY 2.0 license.

CC BY 3.0 Sunshine Connelly (WikiEducator)

Ten years ago UNESCO coined the term Open Educational Resources (OER). Since then, interest in creating, collecting, and curating open content for teaching and learning has spread around the world. As part of the tenth anniversary celebration, the OER Foundation will host another free course, Open Content Licensing for Educators.

The course runs from June 20 – July 3, 2012 and the organizers are hoping to break the record of 1067 registrations set in a similar course they offered in January. I was a participant in the January sessions and truly enjoyed the exploration of issues around intellectual property, fair use, and creative commons licensing.  The discussions were fascinating and helped me understand how my thinking about intellectual property and copyright was similar to and often different from the thinking of participants in other parts of the world. Registration and course information can be found at the OCL4Ed wiki site.

public domain image

One of the prime advantages to using technology in the science classroom is the real-time, particpatory collection of data. Participants will be introduced to how Data Studio, Logger Pro, MyWorld, and Numbers can be used to deal with data. Vital Signs, a website from Gulf of Maine Research Institute allows students and teachers not only to interact with a database about invasive species, but also to contribute their own data and discuss results with other classes and even expert scientists. Zooniverse has a number of web-based astronomy centered databases tin which individuals can participate. Participants will examine how technology can support the collection, organization, and analysis of data for science learning and support the conversation about, communication of, and dissemination of data and evidence from and to selected scientific communities. We will also talk about alignment with the Scientific and Engineering Practices from the new Conceptual Framework.

I hope you can join us on Thursday, May 10 at 3:15pm or 7:15pm. Please click on the Webcasts tab to register. We have upgraded to a new registration system, allowing you to register directly in Adobe Connect, making the whole webinar process smoother and easier! If you have any questions, please contact Juanita Dickson. Click on the time you wish to participate in and you will be directed to an online registration form. Please type your email address carefully as all information will be sent to that address. After registering you will receive a confirmation email with a log in link – please use that link to log into the webinar prior to the start time.

Open any math textbook today, and you will encounter page after page of worksheet-style problem sets. These have their uses, of course – but they do not provide the kinds of challenges that will truly exercise students’ creative capabilities, or encourage them to use math as a thinking tool throughout their lives. In this webinar we will see how to construct these challenges using the tools provided by the MLTI. We will review frameworks that can inform the design process, topical approaches that can provide a meaningful context for this work, and how to use the Common Core Standards to inform development. Throughout we will look at concrete exemplars that both illustrate the approach and can be put to work right away.

I hope you can join us on Thursday, May 3 at 3:15pm or 7:15pm. Please click on the Webcasts tab to register. We have upgraded to a new registration system, allowing you to register directly in Adobe Connect, making the whole webinar process smoother and easier! If you have any questions, please contact Juanita Dickson. Click on the time you wish to participate in and you will be directed to an online registration form. Please type your email address carefully as all information will be sent to that address. After registering you will receive a confirmation email with a log in link – please use that link to log into the webinar prior to the start time.

CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Florian SEROUSSI (Flickr)

“To listen closely and reply well is the highest perfection we are able to attain in the art of conversation,” said François de La Rochefoucauld. In our constantly connected society, some worry that we are losing our ability to communicate well through face-to-face discourse. While most of us recognize listening and speaking as fundamental literacy skills, sometimes these skills are given short shrift in our classrooms and are overlooked in favor of reading and writing.

In this week’s webinar, we will explore ways to use digital tools to give students experiences that will improve their listening and speaking skills and help them meet the Common Core State Standards for speaking and listening. We will take a close look at the CCSS to identify which skills are addressed, and we will share some ideas for using software and web tools to give students opportunities to practice and improve these skills. While the CCSS focus primarily on the skills needed for classroom discussions and presentations, we will also explore some digital resources we can use to help students learn to listen for information and enjoyment and gain confidence in speaking for an audience.

By the way, April is National Poetry Month and April 26 is Poem in Your Pocket Day, so don’t be surprised if we spend some time Thursday practicing our listening and speaking skills with some favorite poems.

I hope you can join us on Thursday, April 26 at 3:15 or 7:15. Please click on the Webcasts tab to register. We have upgraded to a new registration system, allowing you to register directly in Adobe Connect, making the whole webinar process smoother and easier! If you have any questions, please contact Juanita Dickson. Click on the time you wish to participate in and you will be directed to an online registration form.  Please type your email address carefully as all information will be sent to that address. After registering you will receive a confirmation email with a log in link – please use that link to log into the webinar prior to the start time.

Welcome back from what I hope was a sunny and warm spring break! I hope you’ll be able to join RSU 57 Principal Kevin Perkins and me at 4 PM tomorrow for the fifth free live webinar on Mass Customized Learning. The conversation will center on Chapter 8 of Chuck Schwahn’s and Bea McGarvey’s book Inevitable. We’ll be talking about the metaphor of Weight Bearing Walls and how applying this can help educational leaders move toward mass customization while remaining accountable for the learning, supervision, and safety needs of learners.

To register for the webinar just head on over to maine121.org, select webcasts, and then select the April 24 4:00PM link. See you there!

In the Regional Meetings scheduled to take place April 23 – May 3, 2012, you will see how to use a modified Delphi process to help inform discussions and decision-making. Since some of you may want to use this type of process in your schools, the video podcast and slides from the meeting presentation are available for download:

A Modified Delphi Process in Action — Podcast

A Modified Delphi Process in Action — Slides

The data used as an example in the slides is drawn from a session conducted in 2009 with school leaders from schools not in Maine.

Learn to use the tools available on your MLTI MacBook to aid in documenting the learning in your classroom.

Create digital records of student work. Capture formative learning. Organize digital files to aid in assessment and more.

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Specific examples will be demonstrated. Use Photo Booth to record images and video. Use QuickTime Player to record audio, video and even Screen Recording. Use Preview to annotate and resize images.  Then utilize NoteShare to not only manage and collect data but also to critique art works.

There are lots of wonderful resources on your MLTI Device.

Bring your questions and your MLTI MacBook. While discussing the why we will demonstrate the how.

Check out this recorded webinar by clicking here.

Please see the MLTI Minutes for even more examples.

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Current events teaching has never been juicier. Up to the second information on events from all points of the four winds can be easily gathered, disseminated and pored over using digital tools. Videos from within the Occupy Wall Street camp, tweets from observers and players in the Arab Spring uprising and the ability to communicate with anyone at the center of a news story via iChat means that students now have a more immediate connection to events than most journalists had fifteen years ago. And with traditional news sources sometimes struggling to compete with the constant flow of information, our students have never been in a better position to show their flair as budding journalists.

This webinar demonstrated how students can access information and turn it into a news story – making sense of multiple sources, applying a clear vision and creating news stories of their own. We discussed some of the drawbacks to the mass of unfiltered information, and how we can help our students become objective reporters and informed opinion makers.

Here are the links I shared in the webinar:

Newsmap: a visual representation of the Google News aggregator

Google News: Try customising the page using the Preference sliders

Newsvine: user voted news stories – a good place to take the temperature of the news

Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages: over 900 front pages from the world’s newspapers, update daily.

MARVEL: ProQuest News database is a fantastic resource for searching through 1400+ publications from around the world, with many publication’s articles going back at least a decade.

In addition, we looked at YouTube’s capabilities for up to the minute footage of events, and iTunes Store’s News and Politics Podcasts. Google Earth can provide background on the areas where events are taking place, and the World Data Analyst on MARVEL can help with statistics on each country.

Image by Giladlotan on Flickr. Used with a Creative Commons License CC BY-NC 2.0