Veronica Bayles in the instructional specialist at Lawrence County High School in Moulton, Alabama, and a participant in the Alabama Instructional Partners Pilot program. We asked her to share some of the ways she and her faculty colleagues are using the internet as they work to implement CCRS and new instructional strategies.
By Veronica Bayles
At Lawrence County High School, we are working on building a community of professional learners. As the LCHS Instructional Partner, one way I am working to promote this is by creating opportunities where we can routinely share ideas, strategies and resources – often with the help of technology.
I started by creating a virtual filing cabinet called a Livebinder. In our livebinder , I store a variety of resources including instructional strategies, graphic organizers, video clips from the Teaching Channel (an amazing resource) and YouTube , as well as recommended reading and technology ideas that I have accumulated from others. (Here are some examples of education livebinders.)
I routinely stalk Pinterest, Twitter, the Alabama Instructional Partners Ning community, and other instructional websites in search of those “just right” resources to share with our LCHS teachers. My latest quest has been to track down the best resources that support Alabama’s College and Career Ready Standards implementation.
For instance, from the ITunes U app, you can get free downloads of the Common Core toolkit and Achieve the Core resources about ELA shifts, as well as how-to guides for Ipads, Twitter, and much more! (In this first image, you can see some of these resources displayed in the iBooks app for iPad.)
Another free app is Mastery Connects Common Core (available for Apple, Android & Windows). This app breaks down each standard and even explains how to read it. Mastery Connects also has a free app detailing the Next Generation Science Standards.
Gooru, a ” search engine for learning,” is a another great (free) website where teachers can find resources, sample lessons, and even submit assignments! Gooru allows you to create your own resource collections and suggests ways to teach with the collections using five different teaching methods.
These are just a few of the online resources I have found!
Preparing faculty to use tech
The teachers here at LCHS realize the important role technology plays in preparing our students for college and career. To take full advantage of technology’s “value added,” teachers must be comfortable incorporating technology into their lessons.
This is where I use the coaching cycle and our collaborative professional learning sessions to share, plan for and use the resources I find. After planning with other instructional partners in our district, we created and shared with faculty a professional learning survey using Google Docs.
Through this survey, we were able to determine what technology training was needed and who felt comfortable co‐facilitating the sessions. For instance, the survey revealed an interest in Google Docs training. Here is science teacher Jason Goodwin, facilitating this session.
After the session, we created another shared document to gather reflective feedback on the session. From the feedback, we determined we needed to plan both a beginners and advanced session. This is in the works for our next professional learning session. I am currently working on posting videos of these sessions and other resources on my school website, so teachers can have a quick review, if needed.
What ideas do you have for using technology to support CCRS implementation — and for helping teachers gain the support they need to begin smoothly blending digital tools and technology into their everyday teaching?
