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Inspire Students: Bring the Real World into your Classroom

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A key aim for us at BSD is to help teachers bring real world applicable technology projects into their classrooms. Not only does this help prepare students for future life, but, importantly, it helps them understand the relevance of what they are learning. By building something real that can be shared with the outside world, students learn new skills and see the impact those skills can have. This increases engagement, inspires creativity and develops student ownership.

The ‘real world’ can be brought into the classroom in a number of different ways, but one highly effective option is to make connections with ‘real world clients’. Through this approach, students are given a brief and go through the design thinking process to fulfil the clients’ requirements. A great example of this can be seen at Riverside School, Ahmedabad, India where the students complete client projects across all grades.

This video shows one of these projects in action and highlights the impact this style of learning can have on both subject knowledge and ‘softer’ skills, such as collaboration, problem solving and giving and receiving feedback.

If you have brought real world clients into your classroom, we’d love to hear from you! Please share your stories with us….

Who You Should Follow On Twitter for EdTech Updates, Tips and Tricks

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Expand your EdTech Community

As the world of tech is rapidly evolving, it can be difficult to keep up with all the changes, and come up with teaching ideas that use the most up to date and relevant technology. At BSD, we prioritise bringing teachers together as part of a community to learn from each other and share ideas.

One great idea bank is of course, Twitter. Craig Kemp, Head of Digital Learning and Innovation at Stamford American International School in Singapore, and a frequent education blogger, has crowdsourced and curated a list of 400 highly recommended educators to follow – he has an entire section on EdTech with 53 suggestions! Here’s a taster of the people included:

KEITH GEORGE @bigtechcoach

Keith George is the Educational Technology Specialist for the Alabama Math, Science and Technology Initiative, Alabama State Department of Education and previously taught for 12 years. He believes that ‘The time is now for educators to become passionate about educational technology’ and writes a weekly newsletter, a blog and tweets relevant resources and news.

JENNIFER KING @JenniferNKing

Jennifer King is a Grade 8 Math and English teacher who is passionate about technology (specifically coding) and ‘cannot imagine teaching without the use of technology’. Her website gives an overview of what she is doing with her class and has a great tech toolkit.

ROB McELROY @EdTechMac

Rob McElroy is the Assistant Director at Young Hoon Elementary School in Korea. He is passionate about edtech, and using it to make his students lives better and easier. He puts together edtech sessions that can be found on his website.These introduce teachers to technologies from minidrones to coding, as well as Google Expeditions and VR.

 

The rest of Craig’s list can be found here. Get following and be inspired!

Real World Subject Learning Can Increase Engagement in STEM for All

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To increase engagement in STEM and improve its gender parity in education, make subject learning real world.

In this article we share a key recommendation from a study commissioned by The Women’s Foundation, HK (TWF).

The study titled “Gender Difference in Choosing STEM Subjects at Secondary School and University in Hong Kong” aimed to understand the causes contributing to the under-representation of women in STEM subjects in HKDSE (Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education) and the factors contributing to their dropout from STEM fields at multiple stages of education.

Within its findings, the study recommends, “To promote STEM, we believe educators, schools and teachers should consider making math or science-related subjects more relevant to students’ real life.”

It further explains that “most students, both females and males, began to lose interest and confidence in math after promoting to senior secondary school. They complained the subject matters of math have become increasingly abstract…”.

Making subject learning real world takes away the need for rote memorisation, this is something students have expressed their frustrations over. One studen威而鋼
t, whose name was anonymised said, “Please teach us something that we could apply to our daily lives.” Students also expressed concerns over the teaching styles not being based on understanding but rote memorisation – “The teacher gives us the formulas to memorise but I want to know how and why the formula is formed.”

You can download and read the report here.

We would love to hear your stories about how technology has made your classroom more inclusive.

We are proud to have worked with TWF on delivering the Girls’ Go Teach program for 3 years. Through this we were able to impact over 1200 girls at more than 20 schools in Hong Kong.

Girls’ Go Tech is a 1 year long program aimed to increase the confidence of girls in STEM by training them on coding, computing and problem solving skills to maximise their future career options.

3 Ways You Can Encourage Reflective Learning In Your Classrooms

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It’s never too early to prioritize reflective learning in your classroom or online classes. To boost your student’s learning, incorporating early and frequent reflections can make a big difference. According to Peter Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel’s book Make it Stick, “reflection can involve several activities…that lead to stronger learning. These include retrieval (recalling recently learned knowledge to mind), elaboration (connecting new knowledge to what you already know), and generation (rephrasing key ideas in your own words or visually and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time).” In addition, frequent reflection brings greater awareness of the skills learned and helps solidify learning experiences.

Setting time for students to reflect and analyze their new knowledge frequently allows them to digest the learning objectives and activities and make it their own, whether through processes and experiences associated with retrieval, elaboration, or generation.

This is also an excellent time for teachers to identify areas where students need more support. Try the following tools and suggestions to help students document, verbalize and share their reflection responsibly:

Students can learn how to build and share their website using My First Website on BSD Online.

They can then customize it as their learning blog. By keeping a reflective journal in this way, students can actively consider the real-world implications of their learning. Scaffold their reflection by using the following guiding questions:

  • What are the most interesting discoveries I made today? (It can be about global issues, applicable skills, themselves, new ideas, the community or others)
  • What were some of the most challenging moments today? How did I overcome them? What did I learn from this?
  • What useful advice did I receive from my peers?

Introduce a learning tool that is familiar to your students. 

For example, Flipgrid (https://flipgrid.com/) is like Instagram Stories or Snapchat. Students can create short video blogs (vlogs) and post them into a group they make through your teacher account. Please encourage them to verbalize their new knowledge and align it with what they already know.

Start a forum by posting a statement of inquiry related to the topic/unit on Google Classroom.

This creates a focused and live discussion in and out of class and provides a platform for students who may be less vocal in class to participate.

Give these activities a try, and let us know how you get on. We’d also love to hear any exciting tools and techniques you have used to incorporate reflection into your lessons. Let us know here.

How to Bring Creativity into Coding

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HOW TO: Bring Creativity into Coding

3 minute watch

Find out how over 500 12 year-old girls show to enhance daily life by creating wearable technology at school

READ THE ARTICLE

Enhance Traditional Learning and Teaching with the SAMR Model

2 minute read

We got great feedback from you about our last article on transformative teaching, here is a tried and tested model you can follow to simply use a range of technologies to enhance traditional teaching

READ THE ARTICLE

Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid of Tech – You Are An Expert in Your Subject

3 minute read

Read this story about our experience that shows how teacher’s understanding of the subject that they teach is the critical link between technology and the real world

READ THE ARTICLE

Published on 30th July, 2018.

Launch Into Your New School Year With a Real-World Tech Project

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Back to school is both exciting and, if we’re honest,  exhausting for teachers! BSD is here to help you get your students motivated and ready to learn with a simple and versatile project. For the next month, you can try out one of our most popular projects – Online Poster – for free!

  • Using the Online Poster project (HTML and CSS) your students can create their custom webpage  then share it on the web using our one-click launch button.
  • Your students will enhance their ability to think about new ways of communicating content digitally.
  • When your students share their projects with their friends, they can get feedback from and put it into action live, immediately seeing their changes online.
  • Ideas for projects: Creating a poster about their work lets you reinforce student understanding of new concepts learned in Mathematics, Art or History class.
  • How about their digital posters being the marketing solution to promote the next school play, the start of the sports season, or advertise  after school activities and student clubs.

We have included a step by step guide on how we enhance our students’ learning experience using Online Poster in this project guide: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1miUEiK_wjLpzEKvT6RixFYE9Iv3qOts4/view?usp=sharing

To use this project today, simply click here to sign up!

Share your students’ projects on Twitter and Instagram with us using #backtoschoolBSD. The most creative projects, we’ll feature in this weekly EDM and we’ll send the featured teacher and student one of our awesome new branded “Build Something Different” T-Shirts.

Set Your Students Challenges – You’ll Be Impressed!

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In Issue 2, we wrote an article about why teachers shouldn’t be afraid of tech because a teacher’s role becomes one of facilitator and contextual expert . Shelly Songy really brings this to life in her article for EdSurge: ‘How a Tough Challenge Taught My Students More About Coding Than I Ever Could’. We’ll summarise what she did here but it’s well worth a read of her article.

Shelly was teaching a unit on the basics of HTML when she found herself in front of a class that had surpassed her knowledge with 45 minutes of class time left. She reflects that ‘the realization that the students knew as much, or more, than I did about that topic made me feel very anxious inside’. So, what did she do?

She challenged them.

At first she challenged them to ‘find interesting aspects of other websites and research and discover for themselves the HTML tags needed to include those in their own websites’ and it was a huge success. ‘What followed was an amazing example of student motivation, creativity, resourcefulness and personalized learning at its best’. Students were in control of their learning and they thrived.

This was only the beginning though, only the first project. Shelly’s students, already beyond her knowledge and delivering incredible results, would now progress to a second project taking their learning even further. So how did she manage this?

She challenged them again. This time she brought real world application into the mix. She challenged them ‘to design truly professional-looking websites that would be critiques by college professors and published live on the web for anyone to access around the world.’ They were given total freedom to decide what was expected – no set rubric, no timeframes.

What did she find? Her own words sum it up perfectly: ‘The results simply astounded me! This open-ended challenge brought out an internal motivation and non-complacent drive within each of my students to strive for excellence and make their websites even better. I was no longer a teacher; I was a facilitator and encourager. The students were empowered. Anything the students needed to know to build their websites, they taught themselves and used applied problem-solving to troubleshoot the errors that arose. I set the expectation extremely high from the beginning of the second website, and they absolutely came through.’

So, what can we learn from Shelley? We think there are two key takeaways.

  1. Setting students challenges not only allows them to develop their subject knowledge far beyond a standard curriculum, but also brings out creativity, problem solving skills, intrinsic motivation and allows students to personalise their own learning.
  2. Embrace your role as facilitator. Guide the students through increasingly complex challenges and the results will astound you. Kids have big ideas. Teachers help make them real.

Setting Up Your Own Makerspace

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Whether your school has already set up its Makerspace and wants to develop it further or is considering setting one up, this article in EdSurge by Parker Thomas a school consultant is a helpful guide.

Three points stand out to us:

  1. Start with the learning outcomes: “Define the skills, knowledge and habits that kids will learn or develop in your space.”
  2. Develop a community: “Define the culture for the space.”
  3. Make it cross-curricular: “Based on the culture and the desired skills, knowledge and abilities, determine appropriate integration points in the rest of your curriculum and the life of the school.”

While you are setting up your Makerspace, start engaging your students with a free Makerspace Empowerment Program Kit from Particle! 

Teacher Interview: Shasta Quilala from The Philippines

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“Our partnership with BSD has, in two years time, provided us with threefold gain in the areas of:

Student Engagement – Their easy to use and navigate platform as well as the unique and unusual projects have seen us gain an increase of at least 50% overall across those subjects using their material as compared to those without. This engagement has also led to better performance in terms of scoring in tests and activities on the part of the student, and much lesser preparation and checking time on the part of the teacher, which in turn allows us to focus on the learning experience itself.

Professional Development – The computational and design thinking principles embedded into the curriculum drive our teachers towards a more learner centric approach in practice, not just in principle. They have also been able to provide us with real time, personalized support that have enabled even our new faculty to maximize the use of the program within their classrooms.

Organizational Growth – Our partnership with BSD has given us a competitive edge over other schools in the market and a unique value proposition that has increased our enrollment. It has also been an integral part of our developing a future ready, future smart curriculum and learning approach that we have used in order to gain accreditation for our programs at GSC.”

– Alessandra Valino, Vice President of Good Samaritan Colleges, The Philippines

—

Since the Summer 2017 started, we have been working with an amazing school that decided to fully integrate technology education into their subjects and classrooms. We spoke to Shasta Quilala, a teacher from Good Samaritan Colleges who felt empowered learning technology education with BSD. 

1. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and what subject you teach?

My name is Shasta, I am from Dagupan City, Pangasinan. I am a teacher at Good Samaritan Colleges, located at Cabanatuan City and I teach Technology and Livelihood Education (T.L.E.) for Grades 9 and 10. I also teach Computing for Grade 10 with cores Database and Visual Basic Programming.

2. What has kept you busy over the last few months?

The past few months have been very busy because our school decided to run our first ever Summer Camp (Back in March)! With the help of our teachers and the BSD Education team, our students had an in-depth, hands on experience with technology. We received a lot of positive feedback and reaction from the students, even how they felt they were famous techies. They even surpassed our levels of achievement, learning technology education through BSD Online!

When the school year started, we also ran a pre-learning session for technology teachers of Grades 7-10 to introduce HTML and CSS and get students started to help prepare them in using code across different subject areas, like English and Social Studies. It was a bit challenging at first because for some students, it had been the first time they ever used a computer. It was very satisfying and gratifying for us to see our students interests in coding, they could even code better than us!

3. What cool things are coming up in the next few months?

Technology education is being fully integrated into our curriculums this year. I am one of many excited teachers! Some of my colleagues have already started creating their lesson plans with BSD’s integration.

It is wonderful to see that teachers are starting to be more fond of technology and adopting it into their classrooms. They are starting to see code as their partner and tool for teaching, it makes learning more conducive and interesting. We hope it will be as successful as the recent Summer Camp held.

4. What do you want to do next in bringing tech into your classroom for your students?

As a technology teacher, I want to engage students in coding and robotics more, they are very powerful tools for everyone. BSD is a stepping stone for all Filipino students to come out of their shells and develop their tech journeys, we know and can see that there is a lot of potential. As their teacher, I am ready to mold and guide them towards the competitive world outside the four corners of our classrooms.

Why Coding Has a Place in Every Classroom

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What is the role of educators? Fong Ly, an educator from the US, sums it up well in his article for eSchoolNews: ‘it’s our job to figure out how to equip students with the skills they need to be well-prepared for college and careers. One of the best ways teachers can help kids prepare is by犀利士 developing softer skills to make them future-ready. Introducing coding to the classroom does just that.

What do we know about the careers we are preparing students for? This is a challenging question because the answer is fairly unknown. Industries are changing like never before, but we know that the world is digitizing. Technology skills are increasingly fundamental to the world of work. We also know that ‘softer skills,’ or 21st-century skills, such as critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, curiosity, and creativity, are held in higher regard than ever before.

Frequent misconceptions of coding include: It is only for students who are good at math, want careers in technology companies or ICT Classes. Irrespective of your interests, you will use code and the skills and thinking developed through programming. These include computational and design thinking, logic, and reasoning skills!).

Scenario:

A few restaurant owners are deciding what to put on their new menu. Before they make their decision, they need to consider what customers generally purchase from their restaurant. Technology enables people to collect data to make data-driven, tactical decisions. The Point of Sale (POS) system allows restaurant owners to see which menu items were popular among their customers. They find that the pasta was the most ordered type of food, so they start brainstorming on additional options, cooking, and testing out which ones perform the best. This is an example of design thinking being used in daily life: 

Coders may use computational and design thinking every day, but so do restaurant owners. Everyone benefits from digital skills learning, regardless of their background or industry. This is why coding is the gateway to digital skills and the creation of solutions – it helps you become future-proof.

So what does more integration of technology learning in a school look like?

We believe coding should be present in all subjects, whether it’s a code club or a computer science class. Otherwise, not all students can develop these skills. However, by bringing technology projects into all subjects, we align these vital skills with the interests of all students. This helps to prepare them for their future. The subject becomes the context, and the projects create a more engaging way for students to either learn the concepts of the subject or become a content vessel to present what they are learning in the class.

Fong Ly and his school, Amana Academy, have the same ethos.

He shares their approach to their curriculum in his article – it is ‘based on an expeditionary learning framework, meaning that teachers develop curriculum that involves all content areas and encourages collaboration across subjects. This means we’re training multiple skills at the same time. So, for example, we identified that coding was a great asset that could be integrated into all subjects….’ Find out more about Long Fy’s approach here. Students can use it and benefit from it at school, home, and daily life, even after their formal education and into their workspaces.

Are you bringing technology projects into a range of subjects at your school? Tell us more by emailing us at info@bsd.education and have a chance to be featured in one of our newsletters!

Interested in learning bringing coding into your classrooms? Reach out to us here.