LHRIC Honors Local Educators for Innovative Use of Technology

The Lower Hudson Regional Information Center presented four teachers, one director of technology and representatives of the Bronxville School District with Pioneer Awards May 15 during a special ceremony held at the Edith Macy Conference Center in Briarcliff Manor.

The Bronxville Schools tech team, from left: Mara Koetke,
director of Curriculum & Instruction, Superintendent David Quattrone,
Director of Technology Jennifer Forsberg, Brad Ashley, K-12 instructional
technology specialist, Tricia Murray, principal of Bronxville Elementary School,
and Lawrence Daniels, LHRIC network specialist.

The annual awards ceremony honors school districts, teachers and administrators who work collaboratively with the LHRIC and in particular, recognizes their efforts to go above and beyond in making 21^st century instructional technology available to their students.

The Bronxville School District was singled out for its efforts to instill innovation, leadership, critical thinking and engaged citizenship by way of a framework called The Bronxville Promise. The initiative is designed to guide students, help teachers organize teaching and learning activities, and engage parents and the larger Bronxville community around technology issues.

Jesse Lubinsky, center, pictured with his award, along with Irvington
Superintendent Kris Harrington and other administrators
from the district. 

Jesse Lubinsky, director of technology for the Irvington School District, received the Director of Technology Pioneer Award for his work on Project Lead the Way, a STEAM initiative that incorporates instruction in computer science, engineering and biomedical science.

He was also recognized for helping teachers develop “20% time” projects in their classrooms, similar to a policy that Google uses in its workplace where employees get to work on projects outside of their official job descriptions. He has also been responsible for introducing students to immersive game-based learning platforms and helping to redesign a middle school classroom into a flexible learning space.

The teachers who received Pioneer Awards included:

• Marcus Eure of Brewster High School who has successfully blended various technologies into his English instruction, including student-run subreddits, which is an online bulletin board system; Google Apps for Education; Medium.com for student publishing and collaboration, as well as Twitter.
• Amanda McArthur-Gawron of the Lakeland School District who was recognized for taking the lead on a Chromebook one-to-one laptop initiative that started with her third-grade class and spread to all five of the district’s elementary schools.
• Jill Rogovic of the Ardsley School District who successfully integrated technology into her second-grade classroom, including iPads and other digital devices.
• Patricia Satalich, a technology teacher at Pelham Middle School who has taken the lead on several STEAM projects at the school. 

This year’s event began with a keynote presentation from the Los Angeles-based Apple Distinguished Educator and Google Certified Teacher Kenneth Shelton, who talked about ways that technology can be used to enhance learning and how proper usage, voice and the appropriate amount of responsibility on the part of teachers and parents can help accelerate learning.

Photos of the event can be viewed on the SWBOCES/LHRIC Flickr page.

TLI - Tech Expo Highlights Innovative Technology Practices

Over 350 educators from across the region turned out April 17 to attend the LHRIC’s popular Tech Expo 2015 and to learn from some of the nation’s leading experts on the growing influence of technology in the classroom and in students’ lives.

Now in its ninth year, the event continues to grow as school district representatives savor the opportunity to learn from the best, to network with their peers, to learn something from the more than 35 breakout seminars and work sessions and to meet face-to-face with some of the nation’s leading technology companies and sponsors of the daylong event.   

Dr. Tony Wagner speaks to a packed auditorium.

In his keynote presentation, Dr. Tony Wagner, expert-in-residence at Harvard University’s Innovation Lab, urged his audience in the packed auditorium to put a larger context on the work of improving test scores and Common Core requirements.

“The world no longer cares about how much you know,” he said. “It’s about what you can do with what you know and how you prepare young people for innovation.”

Understanding the role of teachers, mentors and the larger school setting in an innovation world is crucial, he noted. For his book, “Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World,” Dr. Wagner interviewed groups of highly motivated twentysomethings from various schools and different backgrounds around the country in an effort to discover the skills of successful innovators and why they are important to the future.

He wanted to find out if their parental, teaching and mentoring influences were any different from other students. Many of them attend top schools like the MIT Media Lab; the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Boston; High Tech High in San Diego, a network of charter schools spanning grades K-12, the Regio Emilia network of schools abroad and others.

What was evident in many of these schools was that students were encouraged to pursue real interests versus merely achieving academically. In the younger years, parents and teachers encouraged more exploratory play, such as using fewer toys without batteries and integrating “whimsy” into every project.

“We have been talking about getting kids college-ready for years,” said Dr. Wagner to the audience, many of them superintendents from across the region. “But guess what, it’s not enough, not even by half.”

Dr. Wagner explained that many of today’s employers are seeking different criteria from their prospective employees. Fifteen percent of the new hires at Google don’t have a college degree, and the word “college” does not appear on the jobs section of its website, he added.

To better prepare students for this new landscape, Dr. Wagner suggested that schools teach the skills that matter most. “No Common Core can begin to do that,” he said. “We’ve got to be clear about the competencies that matter most, including creative thinking, collaboration, communication and creative problem-solving.”

Dr. Wagner contends, however, that no innovation can take place without a certain amount of research and development. “Does anyone have an R&D budget?” he asked. In one Westchester school district, Dr. Wagner said he is working with administrators to develop an “innovation fund,” to which teachers can apply.

The key to successful innovation is ultimately student motivation, he explained. Using Bloom’s Taxonomy as an example, Dr. Wagner suggested that schools create their own pyramid and tap into the top tiers of it, primarily those that include technology for communication, technology for collaboration and at the top, technology for creation.

Some in the audience wondered how school districts could achieve such a thing knowing the constraints and obligations many of them are under to comply with state mandates.

“You’re not going to flip this overnight,” Dr. Wagner replied. “The first challenge is to understand that the time we are spending on test prep is entirely wasted. Kids don’t remember what they don’t connect to in some way. We should reduce test prep, but I don’t think we can’t eliminate it.”

Dr. Wagner encouraged his listeners to see the film Most Likely to Succeed, which he collaborated on. The documentary is a powerful account of the current crisis in the American educational system and is currently showing in select New York movie theaters.

In response to questions from the audience that spoke to parents’ approval of a traditional education system, Dr. Wagner advised them to have conversations with their communities that can ultimately help them understand the merits of an education that is more geared toward the 21^st century workplace.

“Leaders rarely spend enough time helping communities understand why the education system should change,” he said. “You need an understanding and an urgency around change before you start to see it.”

A wide variety of breakout sessions took place throughout the day, including workshops on coding, Microsoft’s free tools for classroom use, interactive ebooks for learning, Google Apps, the Maker movement at the elementary school level, social media in education, instruction with iPads, the benefits of blended learning and more.

Additional keynote presentations included “The Power of Google Apps for Education” by Jaime Casap, senior education evangelist at Google, Inc., and “Using Social Media in Education” from Dr. Alec Couros, a professor of educational technology and media at the University of Regina, Canada.

To see photos from the event, check out the LHRIC/SWBOCES Flickr page at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/swboceslhric/sets/72157652074051896/

Leadership Expert Touts "Learning Science" as Solution for School Districts

Seeing education through the lens of “learning science” is what leadership expert Dr. Frederick M. Hess believes educators and school district administrators should be doing as they look for ways to enhance learning.

Dr. Frederick Hess speaking at the
Tech Summit Nov. 1.

Dr. Hess, an educator and co-author of the book, “Breakthrough Leadership in the Digital Age: Using Learning Science to Reboot Schooling,” shared this and other insights during a keynote presentation delivered at the LHRIC’s inaugural Summit 2013 held Nov. 1 at the Edith Macy Conference Center in Briarcliff Manor.

The event was intended to highlight the many vendors who work with the LHRIC and local school districts.

By learning science, Dr. Hess does not mean brain science or neuroscience. “That stuff is too far removed from working with the challenges of kids,” he noted. It is about tapping into the existing body of cognitive science and using it to identify where the old schoolhouse idea of American education reformist Horace Mann fell short, said Dr. Hess, and looking at new tools as ways to solve particular learning challenges.

Computer-assisted tutoring models, such as the Khan Academy, ClassDojo, New Classrooms, MasteryConnect and LearnZillion are all good examples, he added.

Despite the availability of legitimate learning tools, however, Dr. Hess believes that tech companies often have a tendency to overly promote the value of such tools in the classroom. “The stuff is cool, but the excitement is a little disconcerting given that educational technology always seems ripe with promise, yet has rarely delivered,” he added.

He cited the experiences of district officials in the Los Angeles Unified School District who halted the home use of district-issued iPads earlier this year after discovering students had hacked them and were using the devices for personal use.

In many ways, it’s not about the technology itself, said Dr. Hess, but the way that educators think about it and what they do with it. “We tend not to be imaginative and smart,” he noted. “We say we need more money, more staff and more professional development, and then we put a lot of technology in schools and wait for the magic to happen, and it doesn’t happen.”

What matters more, said Dr. Hess, is what skilled hands can do with the technology that is available to students these days. Three myths that usually get in the way of advancement in this area include the notion that technology is anti-teacher, that schools need more of it, meaning they won’t transform unless certain initiatives are implemented, and that the next generation of technology gadgets and know-how will make a difference.

A “technology” that transformed teaching and learning several hundreds years ago was the book, said Dr. Hess. The book had two powerful assets, he added. First, its introduction meant that students were no longer hostages to the knowledge of their teachers, and secondly, they could learn from experts all around the world, meaning they didn’t have to depend on school to obtain knowledge.

“There is no magic power in the book,” said Dr. Hess. “What matters is what we do with it. Everything we are talking about today, including new assessment systems, new tutoring systems and virtual delivery, all of these are variations on what books have done for us.”

One way to rethink the integration of technology is to stop looking at technology as a way of “reforming” or “fixing” schools and instead to look at it as a “learning science,” he said.

For more about Dr. Hess’s work, visit his website at www.frederickhess.org.