Cultural Diversity - Global Collaboration

Inspired by friend, SMART Exemplary Educator & Google Certified Innovator Danesa Menge from California, USA and her class last year about cultural diversity, where they need a hand from my students with information about Anne Frank I was wanted to do more with this particular topic. With my global citizenship class I decided that they would create a SMART amp workspace for classes from abroad sharing information about our cultural diversity and cultural heritage. On the Global Collaboration G+ Group I made a call for teachers that would like to collaborate with my students. Within a day teachers from South-Korea, Czech Republic, Chile and several parts from the USA responded. Very powerful.
At the time that I'm creating this blog, classes from different parts of the world are adding content about their cultural diversity to the SMART amp workspace and are learning from others. To be continued ...

Seoul, South Korea

Oakdale, CA

Ashram College - SMART amp Champs

Begin juni ben ik met Henk-Jan naar Madrid geweest om een training van de nieuwste software SMART amp™ te volgen samen met 10 andere geselecteerde docenten uit Europa. Op de twee-daagde scholing waren docenten uit Tsjechië, Spanje, Finland, Zweden, Engeland, België, Duitsland en Nederland aanwezig en de training werd verzorgd door de ontwikkelaars van SMART amp™ uit de VS en Canada.

In Madrid zijn veel ervaringen uitgewisseld tussen de docenten, die allen met een ander onderwijssysteem werken en zijn wensen vanuit de lespraktijk geventileerd met de software ontwikkelaars. Dit waren voor zowel de docenten als de ontwikkelaars van SMART amp™ hele vruchtbare dagen en gaat SMART amp™ nog leuker en beter worden!

SMART amp™ is online software waarin leerlingen erg makkelijk samen kunnen werken binnen eenzelfde project. Je kunt het zien als een digitale poster waarin leerlingen tekst, plaatjes, filmpjes en websites kunnen toevoegen. En met elkaar kunnen overleggen via de chat functie, die door de docent ook gevolgd kan worden.

Er zitten meerdere voordelen aan het werken met SMART amp™. Eén van de voordelen is dat leerlingen er aan kunnen werken wanneer ze willen. Het enige dat nodig is om gebruik te maken van deze software zijn inloggegevens en een apparaat met een internetverbinding. Groot voordeel voor de docent is dat er met een simpele muisklik is te achterhalen wat de bijdrage is geweest van elke individuele leerling.

Binnen SMART amp™ kan je als docent ook toetsen en quizzen klaarzetten. Voor de docent biedt het de kans om veel makkelijker contacten te leggen met andere scholen (eventueel ook in het buitenland). Leerlingen van beide scholen kunnen dan in hetzelfde document werken. Ondanks de afstand en een eventueel tijdsverschil.

Vooral voor de onderbouw leerlingen is SMART amp™ zeer geschikte software om PO’s in te maken. Met de tablet en een internetverbinding kunnen ze in de school maar ook thuis werken aan de opdracht wanneer het hen uitkomt.

SMART amp Champs: discussion on pedagogy

When SMARTamp shifts your teaching from a teacher centered style classroom manager to a more coaching teacher and the curriculum is more student driven, perhaps rules are necessary. In order to gain learning and have respect of others’ work.

Should you be using rules when using SMARTamp in your classroom? Should these rules be created by students themselves or should they be created by the teachers? This should be considered in order to make this work I guess.

Rules when working in SMARTamp could be:

• don’t touch or remove work that others created.
• don’t spam the chat
• don’t spam the workspace

Or from a different perspective, when you focus on the things that are allowed:

• respect opinions
• respect property

In my experience and opinion I think that you as a teacher should first give them time to play. ‘playtime’ is not working, but getting to know the workspace, the way SMARTamp works and have them express inappropriate language as well. They'll learn. Especially when they realize that not only you the teacher, but others in the workspace and perhaps from other countries as well. It’ll take time, be patient as a teacher and they’ll start creating their own content real soon. Make this a students centered workaround and not a teacher driven/centered thing. It’s all about pedagogy …. again.

SMART amp Champs expectations

As you could've read I'm going to the SMART amp Champ event in Madrid with other SEEs from Europe, such as Emil Waldhauser (CR), Sergio Gonzales (E), Tapani Raitanen (SF) and from the Netherlands and The SMART Showcase School I teach: Henk-Jan van Mierlo.

I do hope to gain a lot from the SMART Amp Champs workshops lead by Heather Lamb and Ainhoa Marcos. From the next school year on we will start at my school with a total of 6 classes that'll work with personal devices (Apple's iPad) and I've noticed in the past school year that SMART amp really helps and can take learning to a certain level that works perfectly with personal devices. My headmaster would love to see that more teachers will work with SMART amp, especially since we have a few power users in our school. In my opinion we could and should be an example of best practices with the use of SMART amp in classes that bring mobile devices such as iPads, Chromebooks and laptops.

In order to become an expert user I am looking forward to work with and learn from other SEEs that attend this SMART amp Champ Summit and hope to bring back a lot of new ideas, tips, tricks and tools on how to use this collaborative platform in my SMART Collaborative Classroom and throughout the school. I will keep you posted!

Netherlands Google Apps for Education Summit

One of the cool things is to present at education summits in order to share best practices and share ideas with others attending the summit. As you could've read in another blog post I applied to do a session about SMART amp at the Netherlands Google Apps for Education Summit this weekend and that went very well. I did prepare my presentation in English, but due to the fact that only Dutch people attended I did it in Dutch anyway. I handed out some leaflets with more information and every attendant received a SMART Board pointer. The attendants needed to log in to SMART amp with pre-created accounts by me and needed to work together in a workspace where I published a assessment as well. The teacher that gained the least score for the assessment received a SMART amp t-shirt, due to the fact that all the other teachers scored 100% on the assessment.

On Sunday we we started with a real good Keynote by Dan Leighton (Director of Technology, Grammar School of Leeds) about effective strategies in the classroom to gain more engaged students and higher grades. Top two things concerning was he impact of good feedback (formative evaluation) to students and and meta-cognition (self reported grades). I need to process on this ...

The first session was getting more out of the admin console with Google Admin within your domain. I've learned a lot of things and Sarah Woods really took my understanding of working within the admin console to the next level. I'm very happy that I learned a lot today already. Next was the session of Warren Apel with easy to use tips and tricks on how to create engaging activities with Google Maps in your classroom. This was really mind bowing and I've shared a few interesting links in this blog and will create a new one about the cool things you can do with My Maps in Google Maps.

This Google Apps for Education Summit was awesome and I do have a lot to take with me and need to process on!!!

Cool tips and tricks:

Realtime Board: online whiteboard in your browser.
Thematic Mapping: create kml-files for Google Earth.
Open Signal: compare phone signal coverage in the entire world!
GeoGuessr: Explore the world in a real fun and challenging way.
Time Machine with Google Street View.
Google Treks: help out Google Street View in places where cars can't get to.

Cool fun fact that I learned: did you know that when you need to type something unreadable when signing in somewhere, the so called captcha thing, is actually really cool and whenever you use it you' helping out humanity by helping to save our own ancient cultures? These hardly readable things we need to re-type are actually pieces of text from ancient written text and we ar actually helping out to translate them. And the blurry pictures of street numbers we need to re-write are actually from pictures Google Street View took and we help out by mapping the world better. Ain't that just awesome?

SMART amp Champ!

I recently submitted a session about SMART amp to the Netherlands Google Apps for Education Summit, because I really wanted to attend this summit and I even liked the fact more that I could share my experience about this new platform, which engages students to really collaborate with each other. I've been using this for the past half year or so in a few of my classes in a self created domain, to gain access to Google Apps for Education. My students have gained a new e-mail address and access to SMART amp. In- and outside the classroom I can really see the power of SMART amp and I have even shared logins with schools from abroad to give them access to the workspaces my students are working in.

Workspace of my students and students from Orland Park Junior High (IL)

Now I have the privilege to share the how to and my best practices with SMART amp tomorrow at the gafe-summit. I'm really looking forward to it. My presentation is for sharing, the workspace the attendees will be working in tomorrow not.

And it's getting better, because next month I will be joining 12 other SMART Exemplary Educators from Europe to attend an exciting new program for SEEs called Amp Champs! As a member of this elite group, we will receive a two day advanced SMART amp training in Madrid, Spain and support. This is really awesome! I will meet and learn with and from the best SEEs from Europe such as Emil Waldhauser (Czech Republic) , Gonzalo Garcia (Spain), Serigio Cabezas (Spain), Tapani Raitanen (Finland) and our teacher and mentor Heather Lamb (Texas, US). Looking forward and will share my experience in Madrid on this blog ... 

Global SMARTamp collaboration project

After the spring break my students will start collaborating with classes from the US. The topic of this geography semester is the United States of America and I've asked in the Global Collaboration Google+ group if teachers, classes and students from the US felt like collaborating. SMARTamp will be the platform to be used by the groups of students.

My class of 27 students will be divided in 9 smaller groups of three and each group will have their own workspace within SMARTamp and each school from the US will have access to one of the workspaces in order to collaborate and work with my students in order to gain information about school, climate, landscape, culture (art, sports etc.) and daily life.

I will need to create guest accounts within my Google domain, so classes from abroad can join in on the workspaces and collaborate with my students, regardless of the time differences, and learn from and with each other. I have done it a few times before with students from the Czech Republic and will start a grant project within two weeks, where 9(!) classes from different places in the US can join in on the workspaces from our my students in the Netherlands. They will need to share information, experiences, pictures etc. and in that way learn from each other and the extra for my students is that their English will be improved. ;)

At this moment we are going to collaborate with classes from:

• Escondido, CA
• Hughson, CA
• Orland Park, IL
• Plantation, FL
• Pittsburgh, PA
• Kandiyohi, MN
• San Antonio, TX
• Lexington, KY
• Green Bay, WI

How awesome is that! Will share more of our experience within two weeks.