Empowered Learner - April 2018 Issue by International Society for Technology in Education

april 2O18

A PU BLIC ATION OF TH E INTE RN ATION A L SOCIE T Y FOR TECH NOLOGY IN E DUC ATION

UNLEASHING EVERY GENIUS CREATIVE GENIUS ISN’T RARE – BUT THE CONDITIONS THAT NURTURE IT ARE

TOTAL TURNAROUND

HOW LAUSD’S TROUBLED ROLLOUT BECAME A MODEL FOR TECH SUCCESS

STANDARDS SPOTLIGHT

TAKE STEPS TO EMBRACE THE LEARNER STANDARD

EMPOWERED LEARNER

Still looking for the right eBook platform?

Deciding what you need doesn’t have to be tough OverDrive Education has helped more than 18,000 districts and schools leverage the transformative power of digital reading and learning. And you can choose the size that fits best by packaging our service for individual buildings or districts, or even across districts.

WHAT SETS OVERDRIVE APART? Ease of use – A central platform tailored to your district’s needs and the highest-rated app Compatible with every major device Flexible access models, including Shared Collections for schools or districts, to maximize budget & use Expert assistance for successful implementation & customization

Visit company.overdrive.com/iste to learn more

Make OverDrive your school’s digital reading platform Classroom

•

Library

•

Home

EMPOWERED LEARNER

overdrive.com/schools schools@overdrive.com (216) 573-6886

eBooks | audiobooks | streaming video | periodicals

Conference videos Standards resources PLN connections Live and recorded webinars Empowered Learner magazine Free ebook

One stop. All of your member rewards. Let the learning begin at iste.org/iste-central.

EMPOWERED LEARNER

Student-Centered Instruction Ignites Learning When you walk into a classroom, which of these pictures do you see? TEACHER-CENTERED CORE INSTRUCTION

TEACHER-LED STUDENT GROUPS

STUDENT-LED ACADEMIC TEAMS

Engage your students in the quality core instruction they deserve. We’ll help transform each and every classroom into a rigorous, student-centered learning environment and provide the tech tools to help you monitor results.

Visit learningsciences.com/ignite to learn more.

©2018 Learning Sciences International. This form contains Learning Sciences International’s (LSI) copyrighted and proprietary content. This form and its contents may not be copied, reproduced, displayed or distributed, in part or in whole, for any reason without the express written permission of LSI. Learning Sciences International reserves the right to modify its products. 01-01-18 #LSI34-03

EMPOWERED LEARNER

CONTENTS

April 2018 Volume one Issue four A quarterly magazine

4 about us

5 iste in action

Share your vision for computer science standards

6 member voices Janice Mak Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s possible: Bringing CS to all students

8 interview

Neuroscientist Melina Uncapher

17 global focus

Product competition fills learning gaps, lets learners apply the ISTE Standards

26 cover

Unleashing every genius

18 feature

Total turnaround

24 what works

Teachers become STEM researchers Students level up with gamification

33 standards spotlight

Take steps to embrace the Learner standard

38 member profile

Amy Tran Computer science and math teacher, Quebec, Canada

41 take action

Host a meetup to connect your PLN, share the learning

44 community voices

Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s your favorite education podcast?

EMPOWERED LEARNER

executive editor Julie Phillips Randles director of editorial content Diana Fingal contributors Jen Foster Nicole Krueger Jennifer Snelling art director Sharon Adlis iste ceo Richard Culatta chief learning officer Joseph South iste president Mila Thomas Fuller, Ed.D. Assistant Director of Online Learning University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Education iste president-elect Bill Bass Innovation Coordinator for Instructional Technology, Information and Library Media Parkway School District empowered learner advisory panel Trina Davis, associate professor, Texas A&M University, College of Education, College Station, Texas Patricia Brown, instructional technology specialist, Ladue School District, St. Louis, Missouri Ben Smith, educational technology program specialist, Lincoln Intermediate Unit 12, York, Pennsylvania Michael Graffin, STEM makerspace and robotics teacher, Iona Presentation Primary School, Perth, Australia Adam Phyall, director of technology and media services, Newton County School System, Covington, Georgia

The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) is a nonprofit organization that works with the global education community to accelerate the use of technology to solve tough problems and inspire innovation. Our worldwide network believes in the potential technology holds to transform teaching and learning. ISTE sets a bold vision for education transformation through the ISTE Standards, a framework for students, educators, administrators, coaches and computer science educators to rethink education and create innovative learning environments. ISTE hosts the annual ISTE Conference & Expo, one of the world’s most influential edtech events. The organization’s professional learning offerings include online courses, professional networks, year-round academies, peer-reviewed journals and other publications. ISTE is also the leading publisher of books focused on technology in education. For more information or to become an ISTE member, visit iste.org. Subscribe to ISTE’s YouTube channel and connect with ISTE on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Our vision. ISTE’s vision is that all educators are empowered to harness technology to accelerate innovation in teaching and learning, and inspire learners to reach their greatest potential. Our mission. ISTE inspires educators worldwide to use technology to innovate teaching and learning, accelerate good practice and solve tough problems in education by providing community, knowledge and the ISTE Standards, a framework for rethinking education and empowering learners. Subscriptions. ISTE members receive Empowered Learner each quarter as a membership benefit. Members can purchase additional subscriptions for $49 per year. Nonmembers can subscribe to Empowered Learner for $100 a year. To subscribe, please visit iste.org/EmpoweredLearner or contact our customer service department by emailing iste@iste.org or calling 800.336.5191. About Empowered Learner. Empowered Learner ISSN 2573-1807 (print), Empowered Learner ISSN 2573-2137 (online) is published quarterly by the International Society for Technology in Education, 621 SW Morrison Street, Suite 800, Portland, OR 97205, USA. Periodicals postage paid at Portland, Oregon, and at additional mailing office. Send address changes to the ISTE membership department at 621 SW Morrison Street, Suite 800, Portland, OR 97205, USA. Copyright 2018 ISTE. All rights reserved. The contents of this publication may not be reproduced by any means, in whole or in part, without the prior written consent of the publisher. Published April 2018. For information on advertising in future issues of Empowered Learner, please email advertise @iste.org.

Stay connected iste.org

EMPOWERED LEARNER

ISTE IN ACTION Octavia Abell on the refresh of the ISTE Standards for Computer Science Educators.

Share your vision for computer science standards Octavia Abell ISTE CS Lead The first time I visited a computer science (CS) classroom, I watched a group of second graders race across the room in a sorting network. “We’re thinking like a computer,” one student explained. “It’s like when we do a project as a group and work on different parts at the same time, we can finish faster than if we had to work alone.” For this student and other digital natives like her, CS is not just a discipline, it’s a way to understand the world and a foundational skill, no matter what field they choose to pursue. Over the past several years, many educators from around the world have engaged in computing activities with students and worked to embed CS across the curriculum. We know there’s a strong economic imperative to prepare the next generation of CS-literate students – a labor market opportunity to the tune of $1 billion. But CS is about more than high-paying jobs for students. It’s about giving them the tools to create their futures and find meaning in the world around them. It’s recognizing that we’ll solve some of the biggest challenges we face using code, and we need everyone to contribute to those solutions.

We commend the efforts undertaken by countless organizations and individuals to advocate for CS as an integral part of K-12 education and educator practice long before CS education held the spotlight it does today. Still, more needs to be done to give educators tools to bring high-quality CS learning to students around the globe and to design new systems with equity at the core, not as an afterthought. Throughout 2018, ISTE will update the ISTE Standards for Computer Science Educators. This process is an opportunity for thought leaders in CS education and educators at all levels to develop the next generation of computing education standards and define a new paradigm for problem-solving in K-12. This refresh comes at a time when we recognize that if CS must be an integral piece of students’ educational experience, it must also be a critical component of educator practice. The new standards will serve the field by establishing a vision for what educators need to effectively teach CS to all students, and will also guide professional learning for all educators. Through July, we’ll be sharing ways you can add your voice to the standards,

including participating in refresh events, surveys and digital storytelling efforts. We’re looking to you to share actionable steps for putting the standards into practice. This is an opportunity for all of us – educators new to CS and veteran CS teachers alike – to set a vision for how CS can empower students to develop persistence and become collaborative learners. Lend your voice to the refresh of the Standards for Computer Science Educators, keeping in mind that we’re not designing these standards for today, but for the competencies that will be needed in the future. So weigh in. Get involved. And share your vision at iste.org/CSRefresh.

EMPOWERED LEARNER

MEMBER VOICES

photo by s te v e smith

Janice Mak describes how policies, partnerships and planning are bringing CS to all Arizona students.

It’s possible: Bringing CS to all students By Janice Mak

EMPOWERED LEARNER

Computing has transformed the way we do business, organize our personal information, conduct research, think about our health, socialize, listen to music, read books, heat or cool our houses – and yet it’s a subject that only one in four schools teach. This led me to ask, “Why would I want or need to teach computer science?” And I realized that the really important thing about coding is the computational thinking behind it. As Steve Jobs once said, “Everyone should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.” Computer science is about empowering my students to identify a problem, analyze and decompose it, and solve it with a computational solution, using an app, a program or a robot. Our students need to learn how the internet and their smartphones work as much as they need to learn about geography or biology. We need to give them the tools to invent the very future in which they’ll live. As I fully engaged in bringing computer science (CS) to my students, I had another realization: representation matters. As I looked at my class of 37 middle school students, I realized only three were girls.

Half the population was self-selecting out of a field with some of the highest paying jobs. Not to mention, we can’t have half the population designing solutions that will impact the entire population. This really hit home when one of the three girls enrolled in my computer science class sat in the office in tears. It turns out she was afraid of failing because she thought she was already behind the 34 boys in the class. What could I do about it? I started a Girls Who Code club and worked with a community volunteer to raise awareness of equity issues in CS and inspire girls to make, code and create. In the classroom, I let students choose what they wanted to explore. Some were doing block-based programming while others were enrolled in online computer science courses from Stanford University. Still others were doing robotics and creating kinetic sculptures or composing music. It was great to know that I was impacting my own students, but it wasn’t enough. In Arizona, there are nearly 10,000 open computing jobs with an average salary of

over $85,000, yet only 546 computer science graduates (15 percent female). And 438 high school students in Arizona took the Advanced Placement CS exam in 2016, but only 23 percent were female; just 15 percent were underrepresented minorities. Only 31 schools in Arizona (10 percent of schools with AP programs), even offered AP CS in 2015-16. We have a disconnect between the vision of “CS for all” and equitable CS opportunities for all students. “For all” means equity and access to CS for every student in every school and district, regardless of their background. It means that CS is a core literacy that is just as foundational as reading, writing and math. It also implies that we need a new approach to teaching CS because what we’ve been doing hasn’t resulted in opportunities for all. We need CS integrated into the fabric of what we teach. An African proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.” With this view, I co-founded a task force called Computer Science for Arizona (CSforAZ), a team of CS champions composed of representatives from the state department of education, state board of education, the governor’s office, higher education institutions, industry, nonprofits and K-12 districts statewide. As a group, we set out to identify policy priorities with three main targets: CS standards development (which is already underway), preservice and inservice CS teacher education, and CS funding. In our first year, we set forth long-, mediumand short-term goals around CS teacher certification, CS standards development and making CS count as a graduation requirement. We share our CSforAZ vision on Twitter and sit on panels at statewide conferences to expand our sphere of influence. We’ve invited key CS organizations like the National Center for Women and Information Tech-

nology (NCWIT), Code.org and Google to address students at Arizona State University last fall. Our efforts to build momentum and buy-in for CS are working. In January, our governor announced $2.5 million in funding for CS education. As a cohesive unit, we’re advancing CS for all in Arizona through policies, partnerships and state planning. We’re redefining CS within our state while expanding opportunity and access for every student.

We have a disconnect between the vision of “CS for all” and equitable CS opportunities for all students.

janice mak is co - chair of c s for a z, a code.org affiliate, and serves on the k-12 executive council for ncwit, csta arizona board, arizona state board of educ ation and arizona k12 center board. follow her on t witter @jmak az.

HELLOID

identity and access management Web-based or automated user provisioning and user lifecycle management with ID Vault technology. Manage downstream systems such as G-Suite and Office 365.

single sign-on Many applications, one password. Log in once for access to all of your business and cloud applications with the security of two-factor authentication.

One secure portal, providing easy shortcuts to your cloud applications

self-service & password resets

Increase security and productivity by letting your users request access to resources through an entitlement catalog and resetting their own passwords.

cloud-based ntfs data management Easy request/approval processes for “Data Owners,” automatically creating groups, folders, access control lists (ACL) and more.

access governance Manage access rights to applications and data based on user roles within your organization.

user delegation Perform user account management tasks without advanced admin rights. Audit changes and activity to meet compliance standards.

EMPOWERED LEARNER

INTERVIEW Melina Uncapher is reimagining how neuroscience can aid educators and guide teaching practice.

Melina Uncapher Neuroscientist is connecting the science of learning to education practice By Julie Phillips Randles

EMPOWERED LEARNER

It’s a given that an assistant professor in the department of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), a woman who leads the Science of Learning research network funded by National Science Foundation and is executive director of the Institute for Applied Neuroscience nonprofit has smarts. But Melina Uncapher, Ph.D., is more than brainy. She’s using her expertise to reimagine how neuroscience can aid educators and guide teaching practice. Her 17-year focus has been on diving into how executive function/cognitive control contributes to academic achievement, and while she’s typically studied this in college students, she now focuses on the relatively understudied age group of middle childhood (8-12 year olds). In plain English, that means she studies how the brain functions. She then partners with educators to help them apply these insights in classrooms around the country. Mobile technology developed by Adam Gazzaley, Ph.D., executive director; Joaquin Anguera, Ph.D., director of clinical program; and Roger Anguera, director of technology program, at UCSF’s Neuroscape translational neuroscience center allows Uncapher to take her scientific studies out of the lab and into classrooms. “Knowing how the brain works is important for education, but understanding what neurotransmitters are doing at the synapse may not be,” she told EdSurge in 2017. “There is some fundamental utility, but I don’t think it will save us.” Instead, it’s the application she’s striving for. For instance, in some neighborhoods, a student may have to walk through a dangerous part of town to get to school. “His brain is highly tuned to external threat,” she says. “You can try to teach as much as you want, but if he is monitoring [his environment for threats], he might not be encoding what you’re saying.” That’s why Design Tech High School, a charter school in California’s Bay Area, turned to Uncapher when drawing up its design thinking curriculum for students. They wanted a firm grasp on what makes their students tick.

EMPOWERED LEARNER

photos by hope h a rris

Melina Uncapher always wears a lab coat when she works in schools, driving home the message that science can be fun and that not all scientists are white males.

INTERVIEW

“ There are so many misconceptions about minorities’ abilities in STEM; it’s time we become the generation to do away with them.”

EMPOWERED LEARNER

Uncapher and the school co-created a “learning engineering institute” for educators. Today, the educators consider themselves “learning engineers” who apply brain research and design thinking to affect student outcomes. Uncapher sees learning engineering as a new way to build research-practice partnerships. With this in mind, she co-founded and is CEO of a nonprofit that arms educators and students with practical tools based on learning science, and more recently has been working with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to build a learning engineering ecosystem with Bay Area educators, researchers and developers (of curriculum and edtech). But her connection to education runs even deeper. She co-chaired a National Academy of Sciences conference on children

and technology, and sits on the board of the Institute of Digital Media and Child Development. She’s also affiliated with Stanford University’s psychology department and is a MacArthur Scholar. In addition to education, Uncapher also applies her lab findings to technology, investigating whether technology and media are associated with cognitive and neural differences. Uncapher’s work has been highlighted in the New York Times and by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). Her outreach work includes serving as a script supervisor on the Emmy-nominated PBS series “The Brain with David Eagleman,” and as scientific adviser on an award-winning short film about the brain titled “The Love Competition.”

ISTE sat down with Uncapher to discuss learning science and her learning engineering mindset. As a leading scientist in a STEM field, what advice do you have for teachers who are trying to help young women and young students of color aim for a STEM career?

I think the topic of women and students of color in STEM fields is one of the most compelling topics of our day for so many reasons. Why it’s so compelling is captured by a wonderful comment from the Dalai Lama who said that the world will be saved by the Western woman. I certainly wouldn’t confine this to the Western woman, because the data show us that diversity – whether women, students of color, or many other demographic factors – up-levels the thinking and success of a group. There are so many misconceptions about minorities’ abilities in STEM; it’s time we become the generation to do away with them. One of the most shocking misconceptions is the much-touted disparity between girls and boys in math performance. This is no longer true. In fact, three major reports (meta-analyses) of over 10 million kids in 70 countries have shown that the gender difference in math performance has all but disappeared. The countries that do still show gender differences are those that have higher levels of gender inequality, such as in opportunities for leadership. Indeed, even simply reminding a girl of her “girl-ness” before she takes a math exam can plummet her performance significantly. This tells us a couple of really important things. First, that abilities in STEM are not inherently different between genders or races, but rather that our mindsets about our abilities are the important thing. As educators, we need to understand that our own attitudes and beliefs about girls and students of color can dramatically affect their ability

to perform. We need to be vigilant about our own biases and how they may be affecting our students. For instance, how many times have you heard or said, “I’m just not a math person?” Have you ever said, “I’m just not a reading person?” Probably not. It’s these cultural messages that tell our girls and kids of color what they need to be vigilant about, which can eat up their attention and leave them less available to perform the math test. Some people feel uncomfortable with the notion that a scientist is studying the brain function of children in school. They may feel it’s unsafe or not in the best interest of the child. How do you respond to those concerns?

I absolutely hear these concerns and respect them deeply, because the brain is at the heart of who we are and how we show up in the world. We are intimately connected to our brains. In fact, whenever I put an adult in the scanner (an MRI), they inevitably emerge from the scan with a nervous smile saying, “Could you see what I was thinking?” I want to assure you that this is not the case. We don’t see little thought bubbles coming out of your brain; instead we see

“This tells us a couple of really important things. First, that abilities in STEM are not inherently different between genders or races, but rather that our mindsets about our abilities are the important thing.”

EMPOWERED LEARNER

INTERVIEW

“ Our brain changes with experience, and neuroscientists are trying to figure out which experiences have more profound changes on the brain so we can support teachers, parents and kids with designing the most effective learning experiences.”

which parts are active at certain times. It’s a bit like seeing which employees in a company are more active during certain times of the year. If an employee is most active during tax season, then perhaps she is an accountant and not the company chef. The important point here is that the reason people can be sensitive about researchers studying brain function in kids is because they fear it being used as a way to pigeon-hole kids and keep them from achieving their full potential. People tend to think that brain data are “ground truth” and if the ground truth tells you that a kid is performing poorly in one area, they don’t have an “inherent” ability in that area. But the truth is that our brain changes with experience, and neuroscientists are trying to figure out which experiences have more profound changes on the brain so we can support teachers, parents and kids with designing the most effective learning experiences. The lab can feel far removed from the classroom. Watching neurons fire in real time in a lab sounds amazing, but how do we make that kind of research relevant to educators?

I actually think that much of what neuroscience tells us has limited usefulness in theclassroom, but don’t tell my colleagues I said this – they’ll kick me out of the club! In fact, I never discuss neurotransmitters or neurons firing in my work with educators, but instead discuss how an understanding of how the brain learns can help them in their practice. As an example, if we know that a very specific structure in the brain – the hippocampus – is perhaps the most important structure for learning and we also know that there are things that make the hippocampus work better, like sleep and aerobic exercise, then we can use this to help design our learning experiences. If we know that sleeping after learning actually solidifies the learning of the day and

EMPOWERED LEARNER

that putting a bit of sleep between learning and testing can be beneficial, this could change how we structure learning and testing schedules. Likewise, if we know that aerobic exercise before learning could actually make the brain more “plastic” and available to learn, what if we put PE before math class? Would that make it easier for kids to learn math? These are all questions we can (and should) test based on an understanding of how the brain learns. The learning process is not only about how we learn and retrieve information. What does brain science tell us about how other factors impact our ability to learn?

As University of Virginia psychology professor Dan Willingham beautifully puts it, “Learning is the residue of experience.” What this means technically is that the learning process consists of three stages: First we record information into memory (encoding), then that information is stored in memory (consolidation), and the ultimate expression of learning is that the right information is retrieved at the right time (retrieval). So, yes, this means there are many factors that occur at each of these three stages that can influence learning. If we know what these factors are, we can leverage them to build more optimal learning environments for everyone. For instance, things that optimize the encoding stage are things that allow your brain to “turn up the signal” and give the hippocampus more signal to store in memory, like if the to-be-learned material is meaningful, self-relevant or has some social orientation. Things that can optimize the consolidation stage are sleep, exercise and time. Things that can optimize the retrieval stage are good retrieval cues and building multiple routes to the memory via retrieval practice. In addition, there are many factors that can influence learning, like the will to learn

and the skill to learn (motivation and current ability), persistence through struggle (grit), the ability to try new to strategies to learn, peer influence and so many more. You’ve studied the relationships between media use and the teen brain. What’s one thing teachers and parents might be surprised by?

The thing that surprises most parents and teachers, and delights most teens, is that playing action video games can actually develop core brain abilities, although there are some key caveats to this. This is work led by other researchers, including Daphne Bavelier, Ph.D., and C. Shawn Green, Ph.D., and shows that playing action video games (typically first- and third-person shooter games) can have some positive effects on brain and cognition. Besides building hand-eye coordination and other physical abilities, these games can also build executive functioning or core

cognitive capacities including attention and pattern recognition. Unfortunately, most of these games also include violence, which is not good for teen brains to be exposed to. So there’s a big effort to build new games that include the good parts that build executive functioning without the bad parts like violence and antisocial messaging. Are there topics or experiences you think should be included in teacher education programs today that would help educators understand how learning happens and would aid them in teaching students about how they learn?

There’s an entire field of learning science that could empower educators with principles of how students learn, and there’s a powerful and growing movement to bring the science of learning into education practice. I think this is a great and necessary first step, but I also believe we need to respect the wisdom

“The thing that surprises most parents and teachers, and delights most teens, is that playing action video games can actually develop core brain abilities, although there are some key caveats to this.”

EMPOWERED LEARNER

INTERVIEW

“ How I describe learning engineering is, how do we take the principles from science of learning, the processes of engineering or user centered design (design thinking) and the platforms of technology and social infrastructures to engineer solutions to grand challenges in education?”

EMPOWERED LEARNER

of the educator and also ask, “What should researchers know about how students learn in the real world?” and perhaps more importantly, “What are problems of practice that learning scientists should be studying?” When we move away from simply trying to throw scientific findings over the fence and hope that our over-worked and under-resourced educators will pick them up and make programs and tools out of these scientific principles, we’ll start a different conversation. This needs to be a bidirectional and mutually respectful dialogue between researchers and educators. Every scientific discipline that’s made an impact in the real world has done so not through its scientists,

but through its engineers who understand the science. Once we engage deeply with the practitioners in a human-centered design process to co-create solutions to grand challenges, then we’ll be on the right track. This may actually require a new discipline or job description in what some of us are calling “learning engineering.” How I describe learning engineering is, how do we take the principles from science of learning, the processes of engineering or user-centered design (design thinking) and the platforms of technology and social infrastructures to engineer solutions to grand challenges in education? And how do we do this in a way that respects the wisdom of the educator along with the insights of research?

It’s such an exciting new field and we’re just building it. But to do it, we need to hear from educators who’d be interested in helping us build this new movement! You’re currently studying how multitasking with media influences cognition, and we know students are big media multitaskers. Tell us about that research and what you’re finding.

We, and others, are studying the minds and brains of people who multitask with multiple media streams at once – like talking on the phone while working on the computer. It’s important to note that we’re not talking about multitasking in general, but instead multitasking with media. There may be something special about multitasking with media, particularly social media, but we’re still trying to figure this out. Essentially, what we’ve found is that people who media multitask are worse on almost every measure they’ve been tested on, and we think it may all stem from a different ability to sustain their attention. When people hear these findings, they often jump to the conclusion that all this media multitasking is causing changes in our ability to pay attention, but I want to stress that it could just as easily be that people with different attention abilities tend to multitask with media more often. To start to get to the answer to this question, we’re now running a large-scale study in kids, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, to see which comes first: the increased media use or the cognitive changes? This should give us some insight into whether media use is in fact changing our brains, which it may not be. You’ve trained educators at many schools in the learning sciences, covering topics like intrinsic motivation, growth mindset, metacognition and retrieval practice. How can schools use research-based practices to change instruction models?

This is again where learning engineering is so powerful. If we start to use the promising principles from the science of learning and design education innovations around them, we now have a process we can use to begin to identify what works in our local contexts for whom, when and where. And this is meant to be used by every educator, so everyone can be an education innovator. In this way, we can co-create solutions for our local district, schools, classrooms and individual students. We can use the usercentered design process to create models, implement and evaluate what parts are working and iterate new models rapidly. We think this will not only allow research-based practices to inform and innovate instruction models, but will also advance the science by encouraging practiceinformed research. When you train educators, you often debunk common learning science myths – like that idea of learning styles or right-brain/leftbrain thinking styles. What are some of the most common learning science myths that continue to be repeated? What’s the one new FACT you wish educators knew?

Some of the most common myths of learning, or neuromyths, found by my colleagues, believed by educators around the globe and found in my own research with thousands of U.S. educators are exactly what you point to (in order of prevalence). The myth that we learn best if taught in our preferred learning style; instead, it may be better to think of learning strategies and how they relate to the topic to be learned. The myth that we are left- or right-brain dominant; instead we use 100 percent of our brains, 100 percent of the time. The myth that specific exercises increase left/ right brain integration; instead the brain is always integrated across left and right sides. The myth that we only use 10 percent of our brains. Again, we use 100 percent of our brains 100 percent of the time.

“Another misconception that’s important to address is that we always try to make learning easy for students, when in fact we need the brain to be more active and engaged in order to form deeper, richer, longerlasting memories.”

EMPOWERED LEARNER

INTERVIEW

There are real consequences to believing these misconceptions that can result in students shutting down to learning opportunities that don’t align to their beliefs. For example, if I believe I’m a visual learner, I will (falsely) believe I can’t learn anything that’s conveyed auditorily or kinesthetically. Regarding one new fact, because I study and discuss executive functioning and learning, I often hear educators say, “Oh, that kid has no executive functioning.” I’d love for us to change the conversation so we all appreciate that every kid (and adult, for that matter) has executive functioning, but they just may not be directing it to the thing you want them to be learning. Another misconception that’s important to address is that we always try to make

learning easy for students, when in fact we need the brain to be more active and engaged in order to form deeper, richer, longer-lasting memories. This is why we promote the idea of “desirable difficulties” or “productive struggle” in students. A bit of struggle engages the brain more and then the hippocampus has more to encode into memory, which produces a longer-lasting memory. Do you ever get tired of thinking about the brain?

How could I? The brain is our last frontier and our greatest mystery. And we now have sophisticated tools to peer inside the living human brain as it’s thinking! As a friend said to me before I scanned her brain for the first time, “The brain is at

the heart of who we are as humans. And yet who gets to meet their own brain?” It’s my hope that every single student gets to be introduced to this three pounds of flesh that operates every thought, hope and dream, and holds the mystery of their humanity. What if we could unlock human potential by simply introducing kids to their brain and giving them the confidence that they can grow their brain to be anything they set their mind/brain to? It’s then our responsibility as educators to remove the barriers to that success and empower them with the skills and environments to succeed.

Build bridges from CS knowledge to practice Today’s middle schoolers may have computer science chops, but they need guidance to build bridges between skills and practice. Learn how to integrate coding and computational thinking into math, science, English language arts and social studies curriculum in Creative Coding: Lessons and Strategies to Integrate Computer Science Across the 6-8 Curriculum.

Order now at iste.org/Coding6to8.

EMPOWERED LEARNER

Lessons and Strategies to Integrate Computer Science Across the 6-8 Curriculum

GLOBAL FOCUS Bijal Damani on how a competition she created helps students explore STEM concepts and the ISTE Standards.

Product competition fills learning gaps, lets learners apply the ISTE Standards By Bijal Damani

As a business teacher in India teaching grades 11 and 12, I’ve realized there are many gaps between the curriculum and real life. The major gaps include: once students choose the business major, they don’t have access to STEAM subjects; all subjects are taught in a compartmentalized matter with no integration; skills training is completely missing from the business curriculum; at the end of grade 12, students face National Board Exams, which are primarily based on rote learning; and there’s very little opportunity to use technology for creation. Seven years ago, I introduced a competition for business students called the Innovative Product and Marketing Competition (IPM). Students create their own teams and, after a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats), they learn the first real life lesson – you need people who complement and supplement your own skills to make a great team, and that may not include your best friends. In this competition, students have to look around their communities, spot a problem and come up with an innovative product to solve that problem. They also have to create an entire marketing plan, including newspaper, magazine and TV ads, radio jingles, websites and social media plans. The first 15-18 days are crucial. When teenagers think of innovation, they don’t think of anything less than a car that flies, a time machine or a device that can clean

their room with press of a button. But since they actually have to make the product, many fancy ideas like these go down the drain. Students have to create functional, innovative and socially useful products, and a lot of STEM concepts are explored at this level. This competition helps students better understand their surroundings, making them empathetic toward various stakeholders in the community. It’s important that the innovation come from the students as a solution to the problem they or their community members have faced. For example, one team devised a ScanPen that, when focused on the QR code in a book, reads and explains various stanzas of one of Shakespeare’s plays in their teacher’s voice. In the process, students explore many subjects depending on their product design requirements. They also try out many tech tools to fulfill project requirements, including recording, editing, publishing, communication, collaboration, productivity and presentation tools. The list is endless! Throughout the process, students have a lot of fun and often don’t realize they’re learning so many subjects that otherwise would be outside of their curriculum boundary. I have a “Wall of Fame” in my classroom where we display photographs of students and connect them to their product demo video through Aurasma, an augmented reality tool. This wall truly inspires the next batch of students.

In this competition, everyone is a winner and every learner is exposed the ISTE Standards. Students are knowledge constructors, innovative designers and creative communicators, while educators are facilitators, citizens and designers.

bijal damani is a globally connec ted educator who has been widely recognized for her innovative cl assroom pr ac tices. she’s the winner of the 2010 iste outstanding te acher award, a scd oye a 2009, forbes phil anthropy award and t wo presidential awards. she was al so top 50 finalist in the $1 million global teacher prize.

EMPOWERED LEARNER

TOTAL TURNAROUND How LAUSDâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s troubled rollout became a model for tech success By Jennifer Snelling

EMPOWERED LEARNER

FEATURE

Spread across 720 square miles and comprised of 1,302 schools, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) – one of the largest districts in the nation – covers a diverse landscape where 76 percent of students receive free and reduced-price lunch. In 2013, the district embarked on an ambitious initiative to use technology to close achievement gaps. The Common Core Technology Project, which proposed giving students tablet computers equipped with digital curriculum, cost nearly $1.3 billion for the purchase of networking equipment and 650,000 devices loaded with educational software. What looked to be a giant leap into the digital age ended with a series of high-profile resignations and a stream of negative headlines. The Los Angeles Times labeled the project, “ill-conceived and halfbaked.” What went wrong? Internet connectivity didn’t work well at some schools, teachers were not well trained on how to use the tablets, software had been sold even though it was still under development and students were able to bypass security features. In short, the district had purchased a lot of expensive new tools without a clear plan for how to use them. Fast forward to 2018 and LAUSD has become a model for how to integrate technology while leading with instruction. What was one of the tools that helped lead the district out of the darkness? The ISTE Standards, which didn’t solve the district’s connectivity problems, for example, but were very helpful in guiding the reboot. ISTE CEO Richard Culatta, who provided guidance to LAUSD while serving as the director of the Office of Educational Technology for the U.S. Department of Education, says LAUSD achieved a successful turnaround by putting technology in service of the learning community. “By hitting the reset button and putting a focus on preparing and supporting teachers, shifting learning back into the driver’s seat, they were able to turn an ugly situation into an example for others to follow,” Culatta says.

The task force, made up of 60 representatives from all district stakeholders, including teachers, parents, administrators and special education, met every Thursday for two years. Gipson asked the group to be learners instead of advocates and immerse themselves in the process of learning about best practices around instructional technology.

Collaborating with ISTE A turning point came in spring of 2016, while ISTE was in the midst of a refresh of the ISTE Standards for Students that involved over 2,700 people from 52 countries, including students and the LAUSD Task Force. During the process, the task force realized it had found an exact alignment with its own ideals around leading with instruction, personalized learning and equity, says Sophia Mendoza, director of ITI’s instruction division. “The ISTE Standards for Students are a set of competencies for students to be successful in a digital world,” says Culatta. “The whole team of educators and students who were involved in the refresh identified the critical skills required for a world that’s very different than the one most of us grew up in. The standards provide a pathway to create global citizens who will live in a world where all their work, much of their civic engagement and a huge part of their personal experiences are going to happen in digital spaces.” The task force realized the ISTE Standards were a good match after a videoconference with Carolyn Sykora, senior director of ISTE Standards, says Vanessa Monterosa, Ed.D., ITI’s specialist of program and policy development. “We aligned our conversations to the standards after that because [the standards] gave us the vocabulary we

Learning and immersing The Common Core Technology Project ended in 2014 when the district canceled the contract and the superintendent overseeing the initiative resigned. In 2015, then-superintendent Ramon Cortines formed the Instructional Technology Initiative (ITI) task force charged with developing a districtwide strategy for providing students and teachers with the technology they need to succeed. Asked to head up the effort was Frances Gipson, Ph.D., then superintendent on the east side of Los Angeles. Gipson initially balked at the idea because she was not a technologist. Cortines replied, “No, you’re an instructional leader and that’s what this is all about.” l ausd photos cour tes y of l ausd di v ision of ins truc tion

EMPOWERED LEARNER

TOTAL TURNAROUND

needed to move forward and helped us put a name to the process of instructional transformation we were pursuing,” Monterosa says. The task force’s recommendations, released in June 2016, proposed a paradigm shift in instruction. “Effective instruction necessitates technology. If educators are not leveraging technology, how will students be best prepared for today’s increasingly digital world?” read the recommendations. “Personalized learning cannot occur in the district’s current instructional model unless educators begin leveraging the many opportunities afforded by digital tools to promote learner agency and academic rigor.”

It’s like water Gipson, who became LAUSD’s chief academic officer during the process, says the ISTE Standards are now woven throughout each and every content area instead of being add-ons to already existing standards. “[The standards] are not just a one-time project, program or event. It’s like breathing – a continual, simultaneous exercise that is both simply elegant and complex,” she says. “It’s about leading with instruction, instead of leading with a tool.”

EMPOWERED LEARNER

Allison Jonas, specialist, instructional leadership support, agrees that the ISTE Standards have been a natural fit since they are aligned to California’s state content standards. Jonas says her job is to help make those connections with teachers and provide professional development that is not in addition to other standards, but in connection with other national or state standards. A favorite line of Gipson’s, “Be a model, not a critic,” has proven vital to the implementation of the standards. “We wanted to ensure that we practice what we preach in the area of personalized learning, meeting the learner where they’re at. And by learner, we mean all learners – from students to teachers to district leaders. We needed to have various entry points on the continuum of learning for all to feel that this is work they can pursue regardless of their technology skills,” says Sophia Mendoza, director of ITI. The ITI provides six models of support: Interdepartment cross-stitching or collaboration. ITI and the ISTE Standards are at the table each time a content team is developing a program of support for all schools. The focus is on

consistent messaging around use of the ISTE Standards and supporting each department. Instructional leadership cohorts. Cohorts made up of a principal and leadership team attend a three-day institute style program that begins with identifying a vision for instruction. The cohorts demonstrate that digital age instruction should not be a separate parallel track, but integrated into every subject and classroom. Jonas describes these sessions as an “opportunity to start focusing on instructional practices, leveraging digital tools and demystifying technology as the focal point in the classroom.” Digital Citizen is an example of a standard the cohort focused on visualizing, changing the focus from avoiding all the scary stuff online to how to create a digital profile for life success. ITI has already surpassed this year’s goal to increase by 40 leadership teams and now has teams at more than 100 schools. ISTE Standards for Students suite. ITI takes a deep dive into the standards by providing a four-hour session covering one standard at a time. Staff is divided into groups and asked to reflect on what each standard looks like and how to apply it in the school. The idea is that each teacher walks away with an idea they can immediately implement in the classroom. Practitioner schools. Twenty-three schools have participated in the Practitioner School Program that uses a distributed leadership model to work on task force recommendations and create an instructional technology plan. “The schools all had this growth mindset around wanting to ensure that the ISTE Standards for Students and task force recommendations were part of their instructional design,” says Jonas. There’s an instructional technology facilitator integrated into each Practitioner School to support personalized learning efforts. Teacher Leader Network. Teachers apply to participate in 10 after-school or Saturday sessions of the Teacher Leader Network. Each session builds on the other and teachers are asked to implement an idea in the classroom between sessions, then bring the results to the next session for discussion. The sessions are focused either on an individual ISTE Standard or computer science. Exemplars. Exemplars, set to launch early this year, will work closely with a school site to showcase or profile a specific practice, ISTE standard or other instructional practice leveraged to amplify a lesson. Looking ahead, LAUSD is integrating computer science classes throughout K-8, pursuing computation thinking as a literacy for all. And due to the district’s past involvement in refreshes of the ISTE Standards for Students, Educators and Administrators, ISTE expects LAUSD will be at the table as it updates the computer science standards, slated for release later this year.

“We aligned our conversations to the standards after that because the standards gave us the vocabulary we needed to move forward and helped us put a name to the process of instructional transformation we were pursuing.” Lighting a match All this professional development is aimed at getting the ISTE Standards into each and every classroom in the district. Luis Torres, a third grade teacher who became an instructional coach this school year, says he sees the power of the shift every day, whether in student conversations on the playground or smiles in the classrooms. The traditional second grade project that involves researching animals and habitats has expanded and deepened traditional learning through the application of the Creative Communicator standard. Students now have access to research links and can generate their own questions and work together to answer them. Teachers then help students put that information into Google Slides they can present to their peers and other classes. “That’s the empowering part, being able to share their work over distance and time,” says Torres. “That’s something you couldn’t do without the technology.” The students that Torres works with in south Los Angeles include many English language learners. He says the technology helps teachers and students transcend the language barrier, allowing EMPOWERED LEARNER

TOTAL TURNAROUND

students agency over their own education. “Students in the classroom are smiling and the learning is not being forced. It’s coming from within the student and that’s very powerful,” he says. “It’s lighting a match that will never go out.”

Ripple effect LAUSD is not the only place where the ISTE Standards for Students are being implemented. Districts in Wisconsin, Michigan, New Jersey, Washington as well as the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) are also using the standards. The Connecticut Commission for Educational Technology (CCET), which oversees 169 school districts, has endorsed the new Student Standards and the Educator Standards, making it the first state to do so in both cases. As with LAUSD, Connecticut sees the ISTE Standards as complements to existing frameworks within the state education system such as the Common Core, National Council for Accreditation for Teacher Education (NCATE) and the American Association of School Librarians (AASL). Implementing the standards in every classroom around the state is the challenge. To that end, Connecticut will focus on teacher preparation, encouraging district accreditation bodies to make the ISTE Standards part of their assessment rubrics, creating a resource library and other initiatives.

ISTE member Barbara Johnson, library media specialist at Jack Jackter Intermediate School in Colchester, Connecticut, came up with the idea of crowdsourcing resources using #trythisonmonday as a way for teachers to post simple methods for implementing the standards on social media so that they could be used in the coming week. The Vermont State Board of Education has also voted to adopt the ISTE Standards for Students. State Board of Education Chair Krista Huling says, “The ISTE Standards for Students will help assist all educators in the goal of how to deliver and assess progress through various academic areas. These standards also strengthen Vermont’s commitment to citizenship in the digital age at a time when civic engagement at all levels are key to strengthening our democracy.”

Share the learning Through social media, cohorts and exemplars, the aspiration to lead with instruction is taking hold in classrooms the world over. Monterosa says the practices are being amplified throughout the district. LAUSD presented at ISTE 2017 and is working with the New York Department of Education to share what it learned throughout its adoption and implementation experience. ISTE networks and coaches provide guidance and sources of information. When the new Student Standards were released, ISTE also provided an implementation toolkit, an e-book and other online resources.

“ The standards are not just a one-time project, program or event. It’s like breathing – a continual, simultaneous exercise that is both simply elegant and complex. It’s about leading with instruction, instead of leading with a tool.”

EMPOWERED LEARNER

“Our recommendations talk about personalized learning and the way the standards reflect learner driven practices,” Monterosa says. “Our school leaders can see the ISTE Standards implemented throughout our professional development, our policies, the way in which our team cross-stitches with other departments where we center conversations around instruction, around students, around their learning. We’re seeing a ripple effect.” And in Connecticut, the standards are expected to ripple into the future. “We see the ISTE Standards as masterful personas that define how students and teachers should use technology to support learning,” says Doug Casey, executive director of CCET. “They strike just the right balance between descriptive and prescriptive, making them relevant for years to come.” jennifer snelling is a freel ancer who writes for a variet y of publications and institutions, including the universit y of oregon. as a mother to elementary and middle school-aged children, she’s a frequent cl assroom volunteer and is ac tive in oregon school s.

“Students in the classroom are smiling and the learning is not being forced. It’s coming from within the student and that’s very powerful. It’s lighting a match that will never go out.”

Learn it today.

Teach it tomorrow.

Need inspiration for tomorrow’s class? Subscribe to the ISTE Blog and get edtech tips, ideas and resources right in your inbox. It’s absolutely free, and the learning is always on.

iste.org/subscribe

EMPOWERED LEARNER

WHAT WORKS A glimpse at some edtech success stories.

Program turns teachers into STEM researchers Cybersecurity is the digital Wild West, and students at College Station High School in Texas are preparing for it by creating a virtual network and using it to practice stopping simulated attacks – just like real-world cybersecurity researchers do. Science and technology teacher John Gerzik developed the unit after spending his summer working on a computer science research team at Texas A&M University where he studied how to stop network attacks as part of the SECURE Project, a six-week research experience for teachers funded by the National Science Foundation. “Real-world experience in STEM areas is such a moving target,” says Trina Davis, associate professor and academic program chair for the university’s Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture. “Quite a bit of research has happened even in the last 10 years. When you think about exposing secondary students to this kind of big, real-world science, it’s very important for those teachers to make sure they’re current and have a chance to expand their content knowledge in these application areas.” The SECURE Project blends real-world research, project-based learning and curriculum development to give educators an engaging STEM learning experience they can pass along to their students. In addition to performing lab research, participants work closely with Davis to develop a grade-appropriate cybersecurity unit – complete with lesson plans, activities and assessments – to use in their classrooms. Why does it work? IT’S AN IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE. Educators in the program pair up with Ph.D. researchers in computer science and engineering to tackle cybersecurity research problems like how to embed and decode messages in Sudoku puzzles. “Their experience in the lab is really a chance for teachers to be authentically engaged in research,” Davis says. “What does research

EMPOWERED LEARNER

photo by emily os wald

By Nicole Krueger

within the area of cybersecurity look like? They literally are an additional member on that research team for six weeks.” EDUCATORS GAIN CURRICULUM DESIGN TOOLS. To adapt their research for the classroom, educators learn how to map out their existing STEM curriculum and use backward curriculum design to see where new innovations can be integrated. “Curriculum maps are valuable planning tools for teachers, helping them to begin with the end in mind and chart a course for the year,” Davis says. STUDENTS GET A TASTE OF REAL-WORLD STEM. Educators get to experience inquiry and projectbased learning in an authentic laboratory context, which they can then emulate for their students. “Now they have experience with what project-based learning looks like,” Davis says. “These are good strategies for designing these types of projects.” The SECURE Project stems from a partnership between the university’s teacher education and computer science and engineering faculties, including Shelly Tornquist, director of PK-12 engineering education outreach; Philip Ritchey, instructional assistant professor for the Department of Computer Science and Engineering; Cecelia Lawley, assistant vice chancellor for academic and outreach programs;

Game helps students level up their learning They might look like ordinary third graders, but in the classroom, they’re astronauts-in-training. Their mission: Find a new planet with enough resources to sustain humankind. Throughout the year, they work in teams and complete special assignments to advance their mission. The skills and experience they gain help them “level up” to become astronauts, pilots and eventually commanders. The team with the most experience points at the end of the year succeeds in finding a new home for humanity. “It creates such an immersive classroom culture,” says Heather Marrs a third grade teacher at Eagle Rock Elementary School in southern Oregon who has gamified her entire class curriculum into a year-long space exploration adventure. “We all have a goal we’re working toward together, and we get to collaborate and encourage each other. Those types of things roll over into everything else we’re doing in the classroom – right into learning.” Gamification, she says, can be a simple matter of layering game mechanics on top of existing curriculum, using an overarching theme to tie everything together. It can work for a single lesson or unit, or for an entire school year. Marrs took one of her most popular units – the solar system – and created a story around it. Then she attached experience points to certain actions such as turning in work on time, demonstrating good behavior, performing various tasks and challenges and completing voluntary assignments.

“It gives them the opportunity to practice their skills outside of class without making it homework,” she says. “Students have done some amazing huge projects I never would have assigned – and they get no grade for it.” Why does it work? TEACHERS CAN BUILD AS THEY GO. When Marrs started brainstorming ways to gamify her curriculum, she realized many of the things she was already doing could be easily adapted to fit the game model. She started out with a few simple basics – a theme, a mission and a list of ways for students to level up – and built from there. “The neat thing is you can build the plane while flying it,” she says. “You don’t have to have everything set up and ready to go before you launch your game.” STUDENTS HAVE A VOICE IN THE GAME. When students complete an optional side mission, they get to choose how to present it. They also get to help decide what privileges they earn when they level up. Having a voice helps students take ownership of their learning and encourages them to unleash their creativity while practicing new skills. The class evaluates each project together and assigns experience points based on the effort put in. “One of most powerful parts of the game is that lot of it is driven by students,” Marrs says. THEY GO THE EXTRA MILE. Even simple game mechanics can reinforce positive work habits and learning behaviors while motivating students to put extra effort into their schoolwork. When asked to document five things they did over their holiday break, some students made posters while others did slideshow presentations. One student turned in more than 15 photos and wrote a page about each activity. “When kids show up at school and are excited and engaged and feel like they’re part of a culture in the classroom that is encouraging and exciting, they’re going to put more effort into everything else they do to learn throughout day,” Marrs says. “It has a huge effect on their learning.”

photos by he ather marrs

and Mark Weichold, regents professor and associate dean for academic affairs. The program will continue to expand the scientific capacity of local educators for the next four years. “Areas like cybersecurity and programming are emerging as a big focus,” Davis says. “We’re providing opportunities for teachers to gain knowledge and insights into the engineering concepts inside cybersecuritywith the goal of getting K-12 learners and junior college students excited about these careers.”

Find more strategies that work: iste.org/explore.

EMPOWERED LEARNER

COVER

Unleashing every genius Creative genius isn’t rare – but the conditions that nurture it are

By Nicole Krueger Hannah Edge grew tired of heading to the emergency room every time she had an asthma attack. So at age 13, she designed and 3D printed a prototype for a handheld device that can measure lung capacity in real time. Concerned about the dangers of loworbiting space debris, 18-year-old Amber Yang adapted an algorithm to train her own artificial neural network to recognize space objects and predict their future locations. The lack of internet access in Valerio Pagliarino’s rural Italian community prompted the 17-year-old to build his own laserbased wireless network using off-the-shelf components. With the complex problems that threaten the world today, humanity needs all the innovators it can get. Yet we don’t often ask young people to solve real-world problems. When they do, we lavish them with awards and call them extraordinary. But holding these students up as exceptional perpetuates a dangerous myth that has permeated the fabric of education, al-

lowing untold volumes of human potential to whither on the vine. It’s the myth that says only a select few students are capable of creative genius – and it’s one that a growing number of educators are fighting to counteract. “The reason we’re not solving the problems we need to solve is because we’re not leveraging the genius in everyone,” says Angela Maiers, founder of the Genius Hour and Choose2Matter movements. “You can’t foster creative genius if you believe genius is an anomaly.” In fact some say today’s education systems aren’t adequately nurturing students’ innate creativity – and may, in fact, be training it out of them. “We’re very condescending toward youth,” says Scott McLeod, associate professor of educational leadership at the University of Colorado Denver. “We hold up the ‘mutational’ example and pat them on head, but we don’t let most kids realize they can do that too.” EMPOWERED LEARNER

Unleashing every genius

director of technology integration services for San Lorenzo Unified School District in California. “In the innovation age, as we want students to be problem-solvers and individuals who can think critically, we need to add a third question: Now what?” The context of creativity

Think back to a time in history that was especially creative or revolutionary – like the year 1922, when Einstein won the Nobel Prize and myriad inventions, from the airplane to insulin, permanently changed the way people live. “Within the space of a few years, we moved from a worldview where time and

photo cour tes y of allison shelle y / the v erbatim agenc y for americ an educ ation: images of te achers and s tudent s in ac tion

IDEAS LIKE PROJECT-BASED LEARNING, MAKERSPACES AND GENIUS HOUR OFFER NEW PATHWAYS FOR FOSTERING CREATIVE GENIUS IN THE CLASSROOM.

As employers increasingly demand graduates who are capable of high-level innovation and problem-solving, educators have responded by researching creativity and pioneering new ways of teaching and learning. Ideas like project-based learning, makerspaces and Genius Hour offer new pathways for fostering creative genius in the classroom. But these types of practices remain intermittent and isolated in many schools as the growing wave of innovation continually bumps up against the outdated structures and habits of school as we know it. “We’ve been in the information age, where students have been taught the ‘what’ and the ‘so what,’” says Sam Sakai-Miller,

EMPOWERED LEARNER

space were absolute to a relativistic, fractured, unstable one,” says Punya Mishra, associate dean of scholarship and innovation for Mary Lou Fulton Teacher’s College at Arizona State University. “So, what was special about that time? Clearly, there was nothing special in the DNA of the people living then. We did not have a sudden emergence of super-human intellects. “The only answer we have is that it has to do with the environment. It has to do with the context in which these individuals lived, thought, worked, played and created.” Though the field of education psychology has long known which types of approaches and pedagogies are more conducive to creative learning, most schools continue to operate in much the same way as they did a century ago, when students were expected to take factory jobs where consistency, standardization, compliance and convergent thinking were the desired attributes. Now educators understand that future jobs will demand a different (and in many ways opposite) set of skills, such as creativity, problem-solving and critical thinking. Yet researchers report that the typical school still spends as much as 85 percent of its day-to-day work on procedural regurgitation, or problems that have a single answer, McLeod says.

“That doesn’t leave a lot of room for creative work. If we want students to ask good questions and do creative work, we have to engage them in learning that doesn’t have a right answer. We have to create learning spaces where there’s open-endedness, where divergent answers are possible, where there’s room for difference of opinion.” To that end, Carmen Richardson, an instructional technology specialist at Kamehameha Schools in Hawaii, worked with Mishra to develop an instrument for identifying whether a classroom environment is conducive to creativity. Known as the SCALE (Support for Creativity in a Learning Environment), their tool outlines three key areas for nurturing creativity: • A physical environment that offers a variety of resources and flexible work areas for students. • A learning climate where messiness and noise are tolerated, students participate in active discussions, the atmosphere is collaborative and friendly, and differences are valued. • Engaged students who work at their own pace on open-ended, authentic tasks; seek multiple viewpoints and alternative modes of investigation; take risks and reflect on their learning; and have time to think creatively and develop their ideas.

NOW EDUCATORS UNDERSTAND THAT FUTURE JOBS WILL DEMAND A DIFFERENT (AND IN MANY WAYS OPPOSITE) SET OF SKILLS, SUCH AS CREATIVITY, PROBLEMSOLVING AND CRITICAL THINKING.

EMPOWERED LEARNER

Unleashing every genius

IN AN OPEN-ENDED, PROBLEM-SOLVING ENVIRONMENT, TEACHERS CAN’T ALWAYS PREDICT WHAT KIDS WILL LEARN OR WHERE THEIR CREATIVITY WILL TAKE THEM – AND TEACHER EDUCATION PROGRAMS OFTEN DON’T ADEQUATELY PREPARE THEM TO EMPOWER STUDENTS IN THIS WAY.

EMPOWERED LEARNER

The key to a truly creative environment is to open the door to as many different types of learning experiences as possible so that many different students can succeed, says Sylvia Libow Martinez, co-author of Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering and Engineering in the Classroom. “Innovation and creativity are about what students are able to do, so freeing up conditions that shut down alternative thoughts and actions is a good start,” she says. “Are students able to do things that are unexpected and serendipitous? The environment should be structured for maximum agency for students.” Four habits of innovative teachers

The concept of student agency can be frightening. In an open-ended, problemsolving environment, teachers can’t always predict what kids will learn or where their creativity will take them – and teacher education programs often don’t adequately prepare them to empower students in this way. Rather, they tend to emphasize classroom management and control. “The idea that kids need to be managed is a different mindset than the idea that they need to be unleashed and liberated,” Maiers says. “Conformity and control are antithetical to creativity.” Researchers have determined that teacher creativity is an important factor in promoting student creativity. In a study investigating the teaching practices of nationally award-winning teachers, Danah Henriksen, assistant professor of educational leadership and innovation at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, identified four key habits of highly successful, creative teachers: • Weaving their own creativity and interests into their teaching. • Making cross-disciplinary connections to the content they’re teaching.

• Grounding school subjects in real-world applications. • Taking intellectual risks and trying out new practices. In other words, to encourage the types of risk-taking and experimentation behaviors that foster creativity, teachers first need to model them for their students. “Educators need to be able to try new ideas, even radically different ideas, without fear of punishment,” Martinez says. “Our own hesitation to experiment is a serious impediment to innovation. In the design process, the time spent iterating new ideas is crucial, yet we expect systemic educational change to be completely working on day one. Educators need to be free to iterate on the design of the school day and curriculum.” The ability to iterate is a fundamental part of the creative process, for students as well as for teachers. Whether they’re building something in a makerspace or creating something in a digital environment, kids need to practice actively failing, figuring out where they went wrong and trying again. On a fundamental level, then, fostering creative genius can be as simple as merely asking students to create. With the glut of digital technologies available, putting creative tools into students’ hands is easier than ever. But a fifth and equally important habit for teachers is to ensure students are using these tools for active creation rather than passive content consumption – a common pitfall in schools. “New technologies are always co-opted to do the same old thing in a slightly fancier version of same old way,” Martinez says. “Film and video were used to recreate lectures, computers used to deliver lectures and tests, 3D printers pre-programmed to print out ‘educational objects.’” A frequently touted internet rule states that only 1 percent of people use the web to create and contribute, while the other 99 percent are passively consumers. To coun-

teract the myth that only a small percentage of the population has ideas worth sharing, teachers need to encourage students to create and share their work in digital spaces. Putting the “A” in STEAM

WHEN STUDENTS LEARN FOR THE SAKE OF CREATING, RATHER THAN FOR THE SAKE OF PASSING A TEST, THEY CAN ACHIEVE A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF THE CONTENT.

photo cour tes y of allison shelle y / the v erbatim agenc y for americ an educ ation: images of te achers and s tudent s in ac tion

Digital creating, which encompasses everything from coding to computerassisted design to video production, can be a powerful tool for engaging students in any subject. When students learn for the sake of creating, rather than for the sake of passing a test, they can achieve a deeper understanding of the content. This is especially true for STEM subjects, which have traditionally been kept separate from creative pursuits such as art and music.

In fact, as educators struggle to overcome the massive shortage of students entering science, technology, engineering and math fields, creativity could be the key to getting more students interested in STEM – particularly those who are underrepresented in computer science and other STEM fields. “I think if you want to reclaim a kid, you start by connecting with the skills and strengths they do have,” McLeod says. “Maybe you don’t know how to code, but I see you’re a good problem-solver in other parts of your life. Then you build bridges between the two.” For students who don’t see themselves as good at math or interested in science, incorporating creativity, design and the arts can provide more entry points and avenues

EMPOWERED LEARNER

Unleashing every genius

THESE SORTS OF CROSS-DISCIPLINARY CONNECTIONS LIE AT THE HEART OF CREATIVE THINKING.

for connection. But it’s not as simple as merely dragging and dropping the arts into STEAM, Henriksen warns. Rather, the value lies in making the sorts of “creative, interdisciplinary, research-based, artful and real-world connections” that are at the core of STEAM. She cites the example of a Spanish teacher who used design thinking to create an in-depth STEAM project on the water crises that have become a growing concern in some Spanish-speaking countries. Students conducted their own research on the scientific and social dimensions of water usage, learned about the cycle of water and created artistic presentations to communicate their work using their newly gained Spanish vocabulary terms. These sorts of cross-disciplinary connections lie at the heart of creative thinking. “To get something novel and effective, you often need to blend ideas or start from an existing piece of knowledge that can then morph or transform when it crosspollinates with other knowledge, ideas or experiences,” Mishra says. “Creativity is often

often a combinatorial thing. So in that sense, the integration of the arts and sciences, or any sort of meaningful connection making between disciplines or opportunity to combine ideas, can be helpful to creative thinking practice.” As a former STEM curriculum coordinator, Sakai-Miller has observed an interesting synergy between creativity and the more analytical skills that underpin STEM subjects. “When we added the arts, we started to see a better flow of ideas,” she says. At the same time, “the underpinning skills are very important. I notice the more proficient students become, the more creative they become.” To McLeod, the “A” in STEAM represents the human-centered function that is crucial in developing students’ creative genius. Throughout history, the arts have provided a refuge for students, “allowing them to tap into a different part of their brain and experience than traditional schoolwork does,” he says. “We have a lot to learn about how to really foster the development of the whole child and the whole adult – not just one that can spit back a few analytical tests.” nicole krueger is a freel ance writer and former newspaper reporter. she writes about education technology and the tr ansformation of learning.

EMPOWERED LEARNER

STANDARDS SPOTLIGHT Jen Foster provides tips for tackling the Learner standard.

Take steps to embrace the Learner standard By Jen Foster

In June 2017, ISTE released the ISTE Standards for Educators, a road map for guiding students to become empowered learners. Formerly known as the ISTE Standards for Teachers, the Educator Standards have changed drastically — as have teaching and technology — since the last update in 2008. The refreshed standards focus on inspiring educators to deepen educational practice,

promote collaboration with peers and rethink traditional approaches. The first of those standards emphasizes the importance of educators as lifelong learners, stating, “Educators continually improve their practice by learning from and with others and exploring proven and promising practices that leverage technology to improve student learning.”

Today’s schools are no longer the eggcrate, closed-door institutions of the past. As educators strive to become consummate professionals and keep up with advancements in research and technology, they must develop relationships with others in order to learn and grow. Let’s look at the indicators for the Learner standard and examine practical tips

EMPOWERED LEARNER

STANDARDS SPOTLIGHT

for how educators might engage in these practices.

Of the many goalsetting strategies, one of the most common is SMART goals, an acronym for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely, that’s often used to set personal development objectives.

EMPOWERED LEARNER

Set learning goals and participate in global learning networks 1.a. Educators set professional learning goals to explore and apply pedagogical approaches made possible by technology and reflect on their effectiveness. 1.b. Educators pursue professional interests by creating and actively participating in local and global learning networks. Setting professional learning goals is an essential practice that supports educators in becoming lifelong learners who try new things and advance their knowledge and skills. Of the many goal-setting strategies, one of the most common is SMART goals, an acronym for specific, measurable, achiev-

able, realistic and timely, that’s often used to set personal development objectives. There are many pedagogical approaches made possible by technology that educators may want to explore, including increasing personalization and differentiation, virtual collaboration (either in real time or asynchronously), project-based learning, makerspaces and STEAM projects. Fortunately, you don’t have to start from scratch. There are many organizations that offer ready-made lessons and resources to help you get started. Looking to learn more about computational thinking and computer science projects? Visit Code.org, Scratch (scratch. mit.edu) or read the K-12 Computer Science Framework (k12cs.org). Want to delve deeper into global collaboration or project-based learning? Check

STANDARDS SPOTLIGHT

out iEARN (us.iearn.org), TakingITGlobal (tigweb.org) or get ideas from ISTE Global Collaboration Network. To keep up on pedagogical approaches and stay current in the field, educators can read professional articles on research-based practices such as those found in the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) database, or participate in online learning opportunities like ISTE Expert Webinars (formerly ISTE Professional Learning Series) or those offered by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). Another way to stay current is to engage with innovative educators on social media. If you don’t have a Twitter account or don’t use it regularly, set a goal to find new people to follow each week, explore educator blogs and set aside time to read sites like Edutopia, Cult of Pedagogy and the ISTE Blog. Once you set a goal to connect with more educators globally, you’ll find an embarrassment of riches. Lesson ideas, PD approaches and new pedagogies will fill your brain. But don’t stop there. The next step is to choose something new and test it out. Whether you intend to refresh an old lesson with a new type of technology or try out a new pedagogy like flipping your classroom or employing gamification, start small. Give it a try and then reflect, asking yourself what worked and what didn’t. Many educators find it useful to videotape lessons and even record reflections in order to revisit them at a later date. The key is to iterate. Never stop stretching, innovating, testing.

Exploration via technology Indicator 1.a. also guides educators to explore new teaching strategies, methods and approaches that are now possible due the advancement of technology. New technologies impact learning environments and challenge both students and educators.

Educators who are working toward this standard are committed to taking risks with new technologies and implementing strategies that empower student learning. The learning experiences implemented in these technology-rich learning environments are starkly different from the classrooms of old. In these classrooms, educators develop authentic learning projects that engage students in real-world, complex projects that require high-level thinking skills, result in real products or data, and encourage collaboration. Take, for example, NASA’s Citizen Science project. Using the Globe Observer app, individual students or entire classrooms can collect data from their local environments and put their observations into global context. The data are sent to the GLOBE data and information system for use by scientists and students studying the Earth. Students can use these observations for their own investigations and interact with a vibrant community of individuals from around the world.

Once you set a goal to connect with more educators globally, you’ll find an embarrassment of riches.

EMPOWERED LEARNER

STANDARDS SPOTLIGHT

Technology not only opens up new ways of teaching, it also brings about an array of new skills needed by educators.

EMPOWERED LEARNER

For the English language arts classroom, students can identify a literary character they empathize with and engage in a videoconference with an author to get the author’s viewpoint on the character and help students overcome challenges and conflicts – for themselves and the character. The Skype an Author Network (skypeanauthor. wikifoundry.com) offers an extensive list of authors willing to connect with classrooms via videoconferencing. Educators who embrace these learning experiences provide personalized instruction to meet student needs. They differentiate and scaffold activities modifying the content, process, product and learning environment in ways that support students in successfully achieving learning outcomes. These experiences integrate digital age skills and engage students in inquiry. In these projects, students are asking questions, and their curiosity and wonderment drive the

direction of their explorations. Students identify their path for learning, determine how to display it and voice their opinions and reflections about it. Providing students with choice and voice in the classroom and promoting curiosity empowers students to take ownership in their learning. As Sugata Mitra says, “When children have interest, education happens.”

Getting to the data Technology not only opens up new ways of teaching, it also brings about an array of new skills needed by educators. For example, technology has made it easy to collect, analyze and interpret data; however, many educators lack the skills to efficiently and effectively do so. Using data to inform classroom practices was a more ad hoc skill for educators in the past, but it is essential today.

STANDARDS SPOTLIGHT

Educators can use a variety of tools beyond Google Forms and Sheets to not only track academic progress but also to see where the gaps in learning are. GoFormative (goformative.com) allows students to respond to questions and assignments by typing, drawing or submitting images. Teachers can see in real time what their students need. Plickers (plickers.com) is a free formative assessment tool that’s great for classrooms that are not 1:1. Students hold up cards with their answer displayed as a QR code. A teacher can poll the class, the students select a card with their answer and the app immediately indicates who answered correctly. Socrative (socrative.com) allows teachers to instantly assess students to get insight into student understanding and then helps them determine the best instructional approach for the most effective learning.

Staying current on learning science 1.c. Educators stay current with research that supports improved student learning outcomes, including findings from the learning sciences. In the past, the teacher was the holder of knowledge and worked to impart that knowledge to their students with strategies like copying, memorization and reciting information. Today, we have a great deal of research to help educators gain a better understanding of how the brain works and the ways culture and environment impact student learning. This research has resulted in the development of new instructional strategies and teaching methods. It has also helped determine the level of effectiveness and age appropriateness of some older educational practices. Staying up on the research can give educators the data they need to move away from strategies that have been proven ineffective or to be just plain myths. One example is the

notion that students have different learning styles, or that they learn better when information is presented in words (verbalizers) vs. students who learn better when information or ideas are presented as images (visualizers). Research does not support this theory and yet it’s widely believed by educators. Students may have preferences, but learning according to preference hasn’t been shown to improve their learning. One way educators can stay informed of the latest research and instructional practices is to engage in high-quality, ongoing professional learning opportunities like those provided by the eMINTS National Center. Educators can also harness the power of their PLNs by connecting to research via social media platforms, following blogs such as Teach to Reach or Learning Scientists, and subscribing to professional journals such as ISTE’s Journal of Research on Technology in Education. When educators strive to become lifelong learners by connecting and learning with others, they take opportunities to try new things, provide educational opportunities that empower students and implement strategies and methods that focus on doing what’s best for our learners.

jen foster is an instruc tional specialist for the e mints national center, providing support and professional development for educators and administr ators working in technology-rich environments. she is al so a google certified educator, tr ainer and administr ator, and is currently pursuing her ed.d. from the universit y of missouri.

EMPOWERED LEARNER

MEMBER PROFILE Amy Tran has a vision for what the future of education should look like.

Amy Tran She’s creating the school of tomorrow By Nicole Krueger

EMPOWERED LEARNER

In a corner of their high school fabrication lab, Amy Tran’s students are building a model of London. But this isn’t just any London. It’s a futuristic smart city where garbagecollecting robots use sensors to navigate the streets, smart lights turn on and off depending on the sun and moon, and each 3D-printed building has a QR code you can scan to learn more about its purpose. “We’re trying to simulate what a smart city should be – what a city of tomorrow should be,” says the computer science and math teacher at Collège Beaubois, a private high school in Quebec, Canada. In a way, the multidiscipline project, which encompasses everything from geography to computer science to math, is a microcosm of her own mission as an educator – to help design the school of tomorrow. “I’d like to change how we assess, how we learn and how we create the environment of school,” says Tran, a 2017 ISTE Emerging Leader Award winner. “If you ask my colleagues, a lot of people would say it’s not thinking outside the box we need, it’s actually thinking as if there are no boxes.” In her third year of teaching, Tran already has a clear vision for what the future of education

should look like. The school of tomorrow, she says, doesn’t have four walls or rigid schedules. There are no exam days or multiple-choice tests. Students aren’t segregated by subject or grade level. Instead, everything is flexible. The curriculum is modular, the pacing is fluid, the environment can adapt to different learning needs and students can take their assessments when they feel ready. She’s aware that’s a tall order, and she doesn’t expect it to happen overnight. “In order for my dream to be realized, the whole thing has to change,” she says. “I hope in my lifetime I’ll get to see that.” In the meantime, she’s working to lay the groundwork for that future, bit by bit. At the forward-thinking Collège Beaubois, where educators are collaborating with three French universities to write a curriculum for developing digital age skills, Tran has room to innovate. Tran’s passion for transforming education came as a surprise even to her. She initially studied actuarial math, working her way through school as a tutor before realizing she had too much energy to be an actuary. “I wanted to do much more than compute probabilities,” she says. She decided to become a teacher instead, earning her bachelor’s degree in education in 2015.

EMPOWERED LEARNER

photos by rober t gue v remon t

Amy Tran says she wants to change how students learn, how they're assessed and the school environment itself.

MEMBER PROFILE

“ I believe we’re assessing knowledge right now and not competency.”

EMPOWERED LEARNER

Now she’s completing her master’s degree in learning assessment at the University of Montreal and developing a system for assessing student competency through project and portfolio work rather than knowledge-based tests. Changing the way schools assess learning, she believes, is the key to developing the skills students will need in the future. “I believe we’re assessing knowledge right now and not competency,” she says. “Instead of judging whether students know the number of an element in the periodic table, we should judge what they can do with that element. We should give them a complex problem to solve and see what they can do with the resources they have. “Let’s stop assessing knowledge. If Siri can answer the question, that’s not a good assessment question.” That’s not to say Tran has anything against artificial intelligence (AI) in the classroom. One of her passion projects is helping to bring AI into education “correctly and adequately.” She and her students have partnered with the Montreal company EruditeAI to help pilot its AI-augmented peer-to-peer tutoring program.

“AI will never replace teachers,” she says. “As educators, we have to be the engineers of a learning environment that will let students develop their competencies, and AI can never do that. But it can definitely help me give knowledge to my students. AI can become a teaching assistant; it can grade papers while I make judgment calls about my students’ competencies.” Once she finishes her graduate work, Tran hopes to be able to expand her impact on education – but she doesn’t see herself ever leaving the classroom entirely. “I feel like one of the things that drives me every day is the fact that I’m in the classroom with students,” she says. “Their curiosity, their thirst to learn, to succeed, to change the world – I find their energy contagious.” nicole krueger is a freel ance writer and former newspaper reporter. she writes about education technology and the tr ansformation of learning.

TAKE ACTION

photo by patrick re ading

Barbara Johnson shares a new way to connect with your PLN.

Host a meetup to connect your PLN, share the learning Barbara Johnson Library Media Specialist, Jack Jackter Intermediate School, Colchester, Connecticut Board Member, Connecticut Educators Computer Association

Professional learning networks (PLNs) provide answers to questions, solutions for problems, ideas for innovation and a lifeboat off our “Educator Island.” Today, PLNs often include colleagues across many social media platforms and virtual groups, making it challenging to meet face to face. An organized meetup provides an opportunity for your PLN to play, hack and learn in a fun and engaging atmosphere. Those are some of the reasons the Connecticut Educators Computer Association (CECA) held its first ever meetup last October as a warm-up to our annual conference. There, 130 educators explored, played and shared innovative ideas, strategies and tools. Here are some tips to guide other ISTE affiliates in creating meetups:

word when they register. Tag vendors whose products will be topics of discussions to see if they can join you, either virtually or face to face, at the event. Promote the location, food, fun and especially the learning and sharing that will happen there.

“ While meeting virtually is valuable, the benefits of meeting in person are priceless.” Focus on content. Organizing innovation and creativity isn’t always

easy, but you can design a successful meetup by focusing on creating great content. Make a plan. While meeting virtually is valuable, the benefits of Use your PLN to brainstorm some hack sessions. What meeting in person are priceless. Gather some ideas for innovative problems are people having that a collective mind could help solve? meeting spaces: museums, technology centers, libraries or maker- We talked about lessons learned from setting up a makerspace with spaces that are welcoming, cost-effective and helpful in getting those Laura Fleming, and about Breakout EDU with Kristina Holzweiss creative juices flowing. Ask people what they’re curious about, strug- (both participated via Google Hangout). gling with or do for fun. These questions promote a think-tank atReach out to vendors to see what cutting-edge technology, mosphere, help integrate hot topics and create value for the meetup. educational resources or interactive games could be set up as a STEAM playground. We had 18 activities and a “speed geeking” Start promoting. Social media is your best friend here. An inforactivity where participants rotated through six fast-paced presentamational email should be sent to your membership, but you should tions by tech leaders in our state. also use social media platforms to spread the word. Tweet to people Contact inspiring educators and edtech leaders who might be in your PLN who have responded to polls and ask them to spread the willing to come to the event or participate via videoconference. We EMPOWERED LEARNER

TAKE ACTION

reached out to Kathy Schrock and Steve Dembo, two featured speakers at the CECA conference, and asked them to come to the meetup. They were both thrilled to network with us in person. Meetups are amazing meetings of the mind. Plan one soon so your colleagues can share their struggles, gain strength from others’ success stories, play with new technology and explore learning opportunities with their peers. It will be an event your PLN will talk about for a long while afterward, and something they’ll want to save the date for the following year!

“ Use your PLN to brainstorm some hack sessions. What problems are people having that a collective mind could help solve?”

Learn more about CECA’s @MakerMeetup2017 on Twitter, Facebook and our @CECACT website goo.gl/bfuorL.

Create new learning opportunities with immersive tech Immersive technology is not just for games and virtual field trips any more. New options provide valuable classroom learning opportunities. Get practical insights and proven examples for leveraging the latest immersive tech for learning in Learning Transported: Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality for All Classrooms.

Order now at iste.org/Transported.

EMPOWERED LEARNER

AD INDEX Statement of Ownership. Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation (Required by 39 U.S.C. 3685). 1. Title of Publication: Empowered Learner. 2. Publication No.: 2573-1807. 3. Filing date: August 15, 2017. 4. Issue Frequency: Quarterly. Number of Issues Published Annually: 4. 6. Annual Subscription Price: $49 for members, $100 for nonmembers. 7. Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication (Not Printer): International Society for Technology in Education, 621 SW Morrison Street, Suite 800, Portland, OR 97205. 8. Complete Mailing Address of the Headquarters of General Business Offices of Publisher (Not Printer): for business name and address refer to #7. 9. Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses of the Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor: Publisher—ISTE, 1530 Wilson Blvd Suite 730, Arlington, VA 22209; Editor—Julie Phillips Randles, 524 Rye Court, Roseville, CA 95747; Managing Editor—Diana Fingal, Director of Editorial Content, 621 SW Morrison Street, Suite 800, Portland, OR 97205. 10. Owner: Refer to #7. 11. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or Holding 1 Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other Securities: None. 12. The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal income tax purposes has not changed during preceding 12 months. 13. Publication Name: Empowered Learner. 14. Issue Date for Circulation Data Below: July 2017 (Volume 1 Number 1). 15. Extent and Nature of Circulation. Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months. 15a. Total Number of Copies (net press run): 16,528. 15b. Paid Circulation. 15b1. Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541 (Include paid distribution above nominal rate, advertiser’s proof copies, and exchange copies): 14,136. 15b2. Mailed In-County Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541 (Include paid distribution above nominal rate, advertiser’s proof copies, and exchange copies): Zero. 15b3. Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other Paid Distribution Outside USPS: 1,881. 15b4. Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS: 24. 15c. Total Paid Distribution [Sum of 15b]: 16,041. 15d. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (By Mail and Outside the Mail) 15d1. Free or Nominal Rate Outside-County Copies included on PS Form 3541: 200. 15d2. Free or Nominal Rate In-County Copies included on PS Form 3541: Zero. 15d3. Free or Nominal Rate Copies Mailed at Other Classes Through the USPS: Zero. 15d4. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or other means): 2. 15e. Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution [Sum of 15d]: 202. 15f. Total Distribution (Sum of 15c and 15e): 16,243. 15g. Copies not Distributed: 285. 15h. Total (Sum of 15f and 15g): 16,528. 15i. Percent Paid (15c divided by 15f times 100): 98.76%.Actual No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date. 15a. Total No. Copies (net press run): 16,255. 15b1. Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541 (Include paid distribution above nominal rate, advertiser’s proof copies, and exchange copies): 13,159. 15b2. Mailed In-County Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541 (Include paid distribution above nominal rate, advertiser’s proof copies, and exchange copies): Zero. 15b3. Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other Paid Distribution Outside USPS: 2,584. 15b4. Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS: 29. 15c. Total Paid Distribution [Sum of 15b]:15,772. 15d. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (By Mail and Outside the Mail) 15d1. Free or Nominal Rate Outside-County Copies included on PS Form 3541: 235. 15d2. Free or Nominal Rate In-County Copies included on PS Form 3541: Zero. 15d3. Free or Nominal Rate Copies Mailed at Other Classes Through the USPS: Zero. 15d4. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or other means): 2. 15e. Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution [Sum of 15d]: 237. 15f. Total Distribution (Sum of 15c and 15e):16,009. 15g. Copies not Distributed: 246. 15h. Total (Sum of 15f and 15g): 16,255. 15i. Percent Paid (15c divided by 15f times 100): 98.52%.17. This Statement of Ownership will be printed in the October 2017 issue of this publication. 18. Name and Title of Editor, Publisher, Business Manager, or Owner: Tiffany Montes, Senior Director of Finance, International Society for Technology in Education. Date: August 15, 2017. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanctions (including fines and imprisonment) and/or civil sanctions (including civil penalties).

learning sciences international 877.411.7114 learningsciences.com Page 2

southern california edison 800.634.7999 edisoncarriersolutions.com Back cover

overdrive education 216.573.6886 overdrive.com/schools Inside front cover

tools4ever 888.770.4242 tools4ever.com Page 7

EMPOWERED LEARNER

COMMUNITY VOICES ISTE members share a few of their favorite things.

What’s your favorite education podcast? Ten Minute Teacher (coolcatteacher.com/podcast)

Edumatch (edumatch.org)

Vicki Davis always has great guests and/or tips. After listening to her podcast, I get inspired to try new things or tweak others. Her mantra is “Innovate like a turtle,” so I don’t feel bad jumping in and slowly trying one of the tips or tools she introduces to see where it goes, or I may stick with one that’s working well for me and my students.

Sarah Thomas’ Edumatch covers a range of topics focused on some current themes such as blended learning, PBL, coding, makerspaces, student engagement and restorative justice, and you can even submit an idea for an episode. The episodes are usually between 15-20 minutes, and the different background experiences and perspectives of those on panel make it such an authentic learning opportunity, and one in which you can interact and ask questions of the panel during the live episode.

Frank Ferrara, teacher, Lombard District 44, Lombard, Illinois

The Cult of Pedagogy (cultofpedagogy.com/pod) Jessica Gonzalez is easy to listen to. It’s almost like a friend sharing some information with you. Hearing stories and interviews with other educators doing awesome things in their classrooms and on their campuses compels you to want to do better and innovate. Todd Sepulveda, curriculum management systems coordinator, Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, Houston, Texas

Hacking Engagement (jamesalansturtevant.com/podcast-2) They are quick-hitters, so they’re great to listen to on the short drive to school. Chris Conant, professional development specialist, Meridian, Idaho

Google Teacher Tribe (googleteachertribe.com) I’d recommend starting with a series from the Education Podcast Network. My favorite is the “Google Teacher Tribe” podcast hosted by Matt Miller (ditchthattextbook.com) and Kasey Bell (shakeuplearning.com). Mason Mason, education technology national instructor, EdTechTeacher Inc.

EMPOWERED LEARNER

Rachelle Dene Poth, foreign language and STEAM teacher, Riverview Junior Senior High School, North Huntingdon, Pennsylvania

THE EPICENTER OF EDTECH

The ISTE Conference & Expo is the place where educator-tested strategies come together with proven resources for transforming learning and teaching. Immerse in leading-edge topics, practical tools and messages from inspirational speakers â&#x20AC;&#x201C; all designed with educators like you in mind. The epicenter of edtech is at ISTE 2018, June 24-27, in Chicago.

16,000 educators 75 countries 550 companies 1,200 sessions endless learning #ISTE18 EMPOWERED LEARNER

EMPOWERED LEARNER