Ticket to Skip A Faculty Meeting

St. Patrick’s Episcopal Day School works hard to make faculty meeting time (and professional development time in general) an opportunity for customized learning and meaningful discussions and work. One knows a school is using this time well when one misses a session and—as I have done recently—regrets it rather than feeling like one has gotten out of jail free.

Image by West Midlands Police from West Midlands, United Kingdom (101 train ticket  Uploaded by palnatoke) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Given my experience teaching at others schools, though, I know that too many faculty meetings and professional development sessions are one-size-fits all lectures or activities that do not fully meet the individual needs of the teachers attending.

With all the attention that blended learning gets as an opportunity to improve students’ learning experiences, are we paying enough attention to opportunities for blended learning to improve teachers’ learning experiences and professional development? Clearly, universities are making strides. Over the past ten years, I have seen more and more colleagues pursue online or blended-learning master’s degrees. But are these changes inspiring the way schools approach the weekly faculty meeting or monthly teacher in-service day?

They certainly could. In addition to pursuing formal education online and in blended environments, many teachers take advantage of the informal learning opportunities online (Twitter and Edmodo, for example) and in-person and blended learning opportunities facilitated by online organizing (various approaches to Edcamp, for instance).

Could new apps help teachers demonstrate to their schools what they learned in these informal learning environments? If a teacher spent a weekend at an Edcamp exploring innovative ways to use iPads in the classroom, perhaps that teacher could show her administrators a badge she earned or progress she made in a professional-development learning management system (let’s call this a PDLMS). This might permit her to skip the generic district-wide iPad training session and instead to team up with other teachers who had also demonstrated iPad expertise. They could extend their learning and perhaps plan a project together. Maybe this progress could earn them another badge or PDLMS credit.

Schools like St. Patrick’s that already provide customized professional learning could use a learning badge system or PDLMS to further customize its approach. Perhaps teachers could receive personalized recommendations for upcoming webinars, online courses, Edcamp sessions, and conferences. Perhaps teachers could tap into a social network to find peers with specific interests or areas of expertise.

What’s in it for developers?

Building an online platform to helps teachers replace seat time in faculty meetings with credit for achievement in informal learning environments could help a developer gather useful data about where teachers seek informal learning opportunities and how schools spend their professional development time. The latter could be especially important from a business perspective because the decisions principals and superintendents make about how to spend in-house professional development time can reveal a lot about the priorities and needs of schools and districts.

Kid-Friendly Tutorial Creator

Hands-on, student-centered classrooms let students create and invent. When students create or invent something especially interesting, peers and teachers ask, “How did you do that?” When words alone do not suffice, or when students are too young to write explanations, what are the best tools for helping students share and reflect on their design process?

Screenshot used with permission from Snapguide.

The Snapguide IOS app provides a simple way to photograph and share steps in a process. One can also rearrange their order and add text if necessary. Capturing screenshots as opposed to photographs requires several run-around steps not worth one’s time, but Snapguide otherwise leads the pack.

Unfortunately, Snapguide isn’t made for children. As a matter of fact, Snapguide’s privacy policy bans anyone under the age of 13 from using its services. Presumably, this is because the way Snapguide handles user data does not comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Complying with COPPA poses challenges, especially for businesses that profit mainly from the user data they collect, but developers willing to reach out to the users Snapguide turns away stand to gain a lot. Google Apps For Education and VoiceThread help to illustrate how businesses complying with COPPA can thrive.

One alternative to Snapguide for students under 13 is Skitch, a desktop and mobile app from Evernote. Sktich users can capture photographs or computer screenshots and annotate them with boxes, arrows, and text. Skitch also offers useful tools for cropping and blurring parts of images. (The latter proves useful when a screenshot includes email addresses or other details that one might want to keep private.) For the purposes of young students, though, Skitch is overcrowded with features. It also requires toggling between apps. To organize images into a series and to share them, one would need to open another app (Evernote or Google Apps work best) and then to perform several additional clicks. Although I have seen a few Grade 3 students successfully create guides with Skitch, the process is too complicated for the majority of young students.

Snapguide and Skitch point the way to an in-demand app that has not yet been created. It would have the following characteristics:

• Integration with Google Apps For Education or a similar platform. This would create a COPPA-compliant way for young students to share their work.
• Simple means of capturing images. Capturing photographs is essential and is easy to accomplish with a mobile app. Capturing computer screenshots would be useful, too, especially if it didn’t require toggling between apps. (Could a mobile device accomplish this through mirroring technology in the style of Chromecast or through a photo-editing algorithm that might cut the glare and ugliness out of photographs of computer screens?)
• The ability to automatically organize images into a numbered series.
• Optional: Arrows, text, cropping.

What’s in it for developers?

In terms of popularity, this could become the next Instagram. It would be useful for school purposes (and schools might pay money in a freemium pricing structure, as they do for VoiceThread), but students who discover the app in school might also enjoy using it at home. Guides on subjects like Minecraft, skateboard tricks, and silly cat stuff might abound. A broad base of users might graduate to a general-consumer version of the app in the same way that young users of Google Apps For Education graduate to Google+ and the general-consumer version of Gmail.