To highlight the value of a productivity suite such as this, note that our writing team used Google Docs to organize and write this book. Twenty-six coauthors took part in writing the NOW Classrooms series, and none of us can imagine how we could have done this without using a collaborative platform like G Suite. As you will read about in chapter 2, high school students especially need to experience this type of collaborative process to prepare for college and career. Using these online environments, students and teachers can keep documents online and available to them anytime on any Internet-connected device. They can keep these documents private or share them with others.
Student Privacy and Internet Use
In many of the lessons, you will see students share their work beyond classroom walls. This connection to the outside world is an important one. As educators, we make it our goal to prepare students for the world beyond the classroom, and they live in a connected world. We mention publishing student work online throughout the book, but before you start tweeting pictures of or sharing student work online, make sure you understand your school’s and district’s policies for sharing information on social media. Very likely, all your high school students are older than age thirteen, which means they can legally create their own social media accounts on platforms like Twitter (https://twitter.com) and Facebook (www.facebook.com) and register to use a host of online tools and services. However, before you have your students use these services, you should talk to your administrator and ensure that you understand what you and your students can and can’t share online. In addition to staying mindful of school and district policies, you should familiarize yourself with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 before you have students publicly share their work.
Assessment
Formative and summative assessments are integral parts of teaching and give valuable information on how students are progressing. These assessments also help high school teachers to streamline their data and adapt instruction accordingly. We recommend that you use your classroom LMS to house your assessment data and ensure that students and parents have access to it. As students share work, give constructive feedback and record your feedback in your own data files. There are many assessment programs out there that may also be helpful, but because this book features creation-based lessons, we focus this text only on formative assessment options in relation to NOW lessons.
Conclusion
Our author team includes a science teacher who also serves as an instructional coach, one English teacher also serving as instructional coach, two mathematics teachers, a school librarian, and an educational consultant. Collectively, we have seen the good, bad, and ugly that occur during school technology rollouts. To better tap our collective experience while collaborating on this book, we created our own personal learning network (PLN). Many different definitions of a PLN exist, but we like this explanation from Karla Gutierrez (2016):
CONNECT WITH US ON TWITTER
Meg Ormiston:
@megormi
Scott D. Parker:
@scottparker013
Tom Lubbers:
@TALubbers
Gretchen Fitzharris:
@gmfeldma
Ellen K. Lawrence:
@LawrenceEllen
Katie N. Aquino:
@edu_katied
Your PLN is where you gather, collect, communicate, create and also share knowledge and experience with a group of connected people, anywhere at any time. It is developed largely through social media, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and blogs, helping us form connections, grow our knowledge base and develop ourselves professionally through continual learning.
During the writing process, we used our PLN to help each other stay focused on teaching and learning first and then match the right technology to the learning goals we set. Because we have seen rollouts done with little professional development, where teachers are left to figure out on their own how to transform their lessons using newly introduced devices, we want to put in your hands great ways to use technology as an accelerator in every subject area, and we want to support you in those efforts even after you finish reading this book. You can follow our PLN on Twitter @NOWClassrooms or with the #NOWClassrooms hashtag. You can also follow us individually on Twitter by following the accounts listed on this page. Finally, you can keep up with our work on our blog (http://nowclassrooms.com). We know that technology tools will change after this book goes to press, so we want to share and continue to learn with you on our blog and through social media. Think of our team as your personal professional development network.
Our team enjoyed our time researching and writing as we discussed our exciting visions of classrooms of the future. We tested our ideas in our classrooms, trying them over and over again while adding different wrinkles and concepts, and then collaborated over our failures and successes. The lessons in this book are the exciting results of that collaboration, and we want you to tap our experience and adapt our lesson ideas so you have your own classroom successes. We look forward to having you share with us on Twitter and at our blog the projects your students create because your success is our success. Have fun on your journey!
CHAPTER
1
Embracing Creativity
When students actively engage in learning, it makes creativity and innovation possible in every subject area, with or without the use of digital tools. Introducing purposeful uses for digital tools to your classroom simply gives you a means of broadening students’ technological skill set in ways that will let them produce quality products for the 21st century. Creating empowered learners is one of the ISTE 2016 Standards for Students that aligns with this chapter’s creative focus. By the time many students reach high school, they are programmed to create work based on a specific rubric. Often, the rubric defines the final project as a poster, a diagram, or a paper. As you read this chapter, think about ways you can empower learners with student voice and choice about what they want to create to demonstrate what they learned about the topic.
Using multimedia tools, like those we highlight in this chapter, gives students creative ways to demonstrate what they learn in any subject area. Think beyond the research paper and other text-heavy projects, and imagine student-created multimedia projects that creatively and viscerally illustrate what they have learned while also offering students more variety in how they work. For example, a group of students could plan and film a video in front of a green screen and add video to the background during the editing process. In the same class, another group might write a rap song to help them remember what they learned on the topic. Letting student groups define their final product is an important skill for college and careers, and it allows students to creatively show what they have learned. Sir Ken Robinson (2009), in his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, addresses the importance of variety in the classroom:
Academic ability is very important, but so are other ways of thinking. People who think visually might love a particular topic or subject, but won’t realize it if their teachers only present it in one, nonvisual way…. These approaches to education are also stifling some of the most important capacities that young people now need to make their way in the increasingly demanding world of the twenty-first century—the powers of creative thinking. (p. 14)
As students learn to become content creators and not