#1 E-Learning: Smoke & Mirrors or the Future of Learning?

Smoke and Rob discuss with Amanda Young how technology impacts both the traditional classroom and the virtual classroom opportunities through the lens of Education Imagine Academy.   

Resources discussed in the podcast:
Dr. Catlin Tucker
 https://catlintucker.com/

Blended Learning Playbook for Elementary Teachers 
by Jayme Linton

https://us.corwin.com/en-us/nam/the-blended-learning-blueprint-for-elementary-teachers/book260737

Transcript

Copy

Rob Dickson: 0:11

Welcome, everyone. My name is Rob Dickson. I'm Chief Information Officer at Wichita Public Schools. And today we have our first podcast. And I'm excited to start this podcast with my good friend Dyane. Dyane, you want to introduce yourself?

Dyane Smokorowski: 0:26

Good Day to everyone. I'm Dyane Smokorowski. I'm the Coordinator of Digital Literacy here in the Wichita Public Schools. But everybody calls me Smoke, because it's so much easier to remember. And Rob, how do they find you on Twitter? I am @showmerob, and I am @mrs_smoke. So if you also want to reach out to us from there, we're available. But let's talk about the podcast. This is something we've been wanting to do for a long time, Rob.

Rob Dickson: 0:54

Yeah, you know, it's so much. You think about where we're at. And it's been so busy. Many times these things just kind of fall by the wayside. But at some moment, you just have to commit. And I feel like we're committing right now smoke, what do you think?

Dyane Smokorowski: 1:10

I agree. And the best part of the bout a podcast is that it's short, we're not going to go for more than about 12 to 15 ish minutes. And it's easy for teachers to listen to on their way to work.

Rob Dickson: 1:23

I'm just now finding this out, I have to limit myself to 12 minutes away all of us to 12.

Dyane Smokorowski: 1:30

Wow, wow, I believe in our superpowers, it's fine. We can do it, we could do it. Well, today we're

Rob Dickson: 1:36

going to tackle this question of elearning. Is it smoke and mirrors, or the future of learning? And I have my friend Amanda Young here, Amanda, you want to introduce yourself?

Amanda Young: 1:47

Sir. My name is Amanda and I am the principal at Education Imagine Academy in Wichita Public Schools. And I'm excited to be here with both smoke and Rob, we get to collaborate a lot and try and make school what we think it should be.

Rob Dickson: 2:03

So we've all around this table and in our discussions have been through and through with technology within classrooms. Let's start with this question. You know, what do we think about e learning and isn't smoke and mirrors? And I just want to kind of leave it open smoke in all of your experience? And even in our experiences together? What are your thoughts around technology in the classroom generally?

Dyane Smokorowski: 2:31

You know, I really believe that when you think about classroom and technology combinations, it's important to remember that the best use of technology is to make the impossible possible. Okay, so what I mean by that there are students in my classroom who have 30 different sets of needs, there may be only me leading it, but 30 people have 30, different likes, dislikes, learning differences, all of those things. And it is really challenging for me to have one on one experiences with all of those students. But through blended learning, I can create a variety of resources and tools to make learning accessible for all of them. So I kind of can clone myself in 30 different individual needs very simply through tech. And I know that sounds complicated, but it is simpler than it sounds.

Rob Dickson: 3:28

You know, I think, from my standpoint, when I look at digital equity and access, I think it's it's a leveling of the playing field, especially for some of our lower socio economic families out there. And moving to a one to one, especially in Wichita public schools, we did so in such a quick timeframe. And while we were doing that, we were also starting a virtual school called education Imagine Academy and Amanda Young is the principal there. And every day, the students in education Imagine Academy get a very high technology experience. Amanda, you want to kind of talk about what that experience looks like education imagined Academy?

Amanda Young: 4:11

Absolutely. You know, we believe that collaboration is one of the biggest ways that we can make an impact with our students in their learning, and engaging them. So we do that in a variety of ways. Sometimes students need to collaborate online, through writing, sometimes they need to talk to each other in breakout rooms, sometimes they need to be in person. But I think that through educating our staff on the different edtech tools that we have, as smoke said to clone ourselves, when the kids are all in different places, they can all be learning something different, but hitting the same standard. And they can show their learning and their understanding in different ways because of the tools that we have available to our students. I think giving kids computers is amazing. But teachers have to be able to teach kids how to use computers to actually learn not just use them as A tool to type on, but to invest in their own learning. So it's definitely been a challenge for my teachers to try to learn in such a short amount of time, and to try and create a virtual school during the middle of a pandemic. But I think most teachers that are not in a virtual school, really only have that experience as a remote teacher, which is different from a virtual teacher are different from a blended learning situation, because we were just putting a BandAid on a pandemic, now, we have the ability to take time to really invest in our teachers and their understanding of blended learning so that our students get the best outcomes,

Rob Dickson: 5:52

I also want to congratulate you because your teachers move so quickly. This is the second year that they've been recognized as a Microsoft showcase school. And I think that shows the transformational journey that you've done with your staff. And I think that's, I think that's awesome. You hit on a point called Remote learning and smoke, I want to point to you and ask the question, you know, how do we get to what, and we've discussed this before, what a new normal looks like, in that adjustment from remote learning.

Dyane Smokorowski: 6:25

So if you're asking me how we take the tools that we have, and you know, as Amanda was saying, We handed them out, and we didn't really have a lot of time to prepare people in pedagogy for the use of digital tools. And now we have these digital tools, and it's time to fill the pedagogy. Is that what you're asking me?

Rob Dickson: 6:42

I think so when you look at that month that we had a fall of 2020, where we had a month to get professional development to prepare teachers. We know that that wasn't the right delivery model to change classrooms across the way, even though we saw, you know, an average of 405,000 teams calls that next February, which was our highest use,

Dyane Smokorowski: 7:04

right? Because right there 405,000 Microsoft Teams call per day, per day per day. Okay, on

Rob Dickson: 7:11

average, when you look at that, what teachers had to do in order to make sure that that happens? You know, obviously there's a feeling of trauma somewhat when you take the amount of change that they've had to incur. And I wonder, how do we make sure that our teachers, a see technology opportunities is something positive for students, and be make sure that we're intentional about delivering the right content within the classroom and offering the right content outside of the classroom.

Dyane Smokorowski: 7:46

So I think the first step in all of this is just to first brief, right, you have a lot of things that you've experienced, you played with a lot of tools you played with a lot of different websites and things to help create wonderful experiences for the classroom. So one, you expose yourself to a lot of these things. Congratulations, you've got a chance to take like the biggest workshop in a short time. However, now it's time to also go and consider which of those tools that I experience, what learning experiences that worked really well. Did I find beneficial, target those and say, which of these work amazing for my students, whether they're in person, remote, or virtual, for example, that digital turn in of resource or of work of students, right? So our district has seesaw, K five, PK five across the district. And if I am doing small groups with kindergarten students, and I'm having students draw the beginning, in the middle of the end of a story, that's something I was doing before technology. However, as a teacher, I was also taking home stacks and stacks of paper, you always can find the teacher at the ballgame, because that's the teacher with the stack of papers right? Now, I have the ability as a teacher to have students snap photographs of what they've drawn, turn it into me plus they can narrate or defend what they've created to give evidence of why this what this is, like I drew a picture of the beginning of the story. And look, I put a tree in there because the tree was important. Those sorts of things are really tough to do one on one with students in the classroom. But what tools like this, we sampled during remote learning. Turns out they're amazing in person as well.

Rob Dickson: 9:51

So Amanda, one of the opportunities that we're seeing right now is we understand that we've got less teachers coming into the profession and you guys are doing something unique around Computer Science at AI Academy. You want to talk about what opportunities are there and how they're leveraging technology to kind of enhance off For students,

Amanda Young: 10:11

absolutely. So we understand that our students are growing up in a different digital age than we did as teachers. And we also see the importance of making sure that our students are prepared for life, whatever they choose to do after school. So, starting in kindergarten all the way through eighth grade, all of our students take coding every day. They're taught coding for 30 minutes in elementary school, and then we actually use Microsoft Imagine Academy to help guide our teaching and our Middle School Pathways, our students will end up taking certify, sorry, industry certification tests in middle school for office 365, from 2019. And then we also are offering cybersecurity. At our high school, we're starting that pathway, also leveraging different different tools. But a lot of the pedagogy is from adding curriculum as from Microsoft Imagine Academy. But with the decrease in teachers, and education, which we all know is here presently, but it's going to probably continue to get worse. We know that, as Rob has said many times, we have to use time and space differently. So I have a teacher at my school, who can teach hundreds of kids cybersecurity throughout the district at the high school level, by being in one location, and then having, you know, classrooms where these students are, but they might not have a cybersecurity pathway at their school. But my teacher can teach those kids as long as they have an adult in the classroom. So it's kind of trying to think differently about how students learn what they use to learn and how teachers teach. And we're just, I'm just so excited about it. My our students are loving it, gamification in the classroom, I think, is a really great way to help students learn and show learning in a different way than just the normal come in, take a multiple choice test, which is not really equitable to all students in your room. So you know, there's opportunities outside of, of high school for cybersecurity where these kids who might not want to go to a four year school, can end up with a career that is very, very successful for them and keep them in our community as productive citizens.

Rob Dickson: 12:38

So we've heard examples here of some great utilization of technology. We've heard some stories. I wonder, between the both of you? How do we prepare teachers that are interested in and going down this route? What What one thing would you tell them to look at as they start to try to navigate down this high technology environment?

Amanda Young: 13:05

I think one thing that is especially important is for current teachers, to make that connection with students who they think would be good teachers and tell them, I think you would be a great teacher, encourage people to join our profession that we are passionate about, are passionate about loving kids, about their safety and about their learning and their success. So I would say that's the first thing. Secondly, I think that how we prepare teachers for the classroom has to be different. Because when I went to school to be a teacher, I took one technology class and we talked about overhead projectors. We can't do that anymore. We need to make sure that when we are producing teachers in at the college level that we are teaching them the skills of engagement through educational technical technology skills, before they hit the classroom so that they're prepared to go into the classroom and help students use tools that they already know how to use awesome smoke.

Dyane Smokorowski: 14:15

I would say that if teachers are curious to get started in these ideas of how do I help all students learn, how do I help set up my classroom for blended learning? How do I even begin to explore what tech is out there that works great for my kids. One call on our team were available. So that's always available. Reach out to one of us on the EdTech team. Secondly, I would encourage you to go explore one of the leading persons in blended learning that's in the education sphere and that would be Catlin Tucker cat li n tucker.com. She has a couple of books out there that are terrific. And one other person Jamie Linton J. A why me? Li n t o n she's got a book called The Blended Learning blueprint for elementary teachers. And tastic phenomenal for K eight. I would say if you're even a middle school teacher, this is worth Exploring.

Rob Dickson: 15:12

Guys, thank you so much. This is a great conversation, a great first podcast, and I appreciate you both and your knowledge around this area. Everyone, please tune in. We'll be producing more podcasts probably on average about once a month. Thank you all so much. Goodbye.

Amanda Young: 15:33

Yes