Welcome to Day 3 of ATLIS 2016 in Atlanta Georgia!
After breakfast, the first sessions was:
PD Crossfit -- Get Your Teaching Skills in Shape One Hour at a Time -- On Demand!
Presenters:
- Jackie Christensen from Blackbaud K12
- Laura Flynn from Louisville High School
Laura was the primary presenter and her emphasis was trying to rebrand PD so that people might view participating in professional development in a manner that echoed physical fitness. In other words, that it is an activity and endeavor that people "do" on a regular basis and maybe do PD in shorter more compact units. She worked to package a number of topics in one-hour activities that were posted on her LMS (Blackbaud) and the design was such that people could jump into an activity as they wished. It's also true that she tries to create her "crossfit" topics on a regular basis and push out an announcement of a new topic about every week or two.
It occurred to me that I could add a sort of PD area on my Tech/Learning Haiku site although it may be more effective to create a separate site dedicated to professional development and keep it separate from all the tech tips and help topics housed now in the Tech/Learning site.
In planning her PD "crossfits" she mimics a pattern you might use to design a physical crossfit workout:
- Warm-up
- Practice
- Pulse Checking
- Teamwork
- Challenge Exercise
- Cool Down
Another fundamental belief of Laura's when conceptualizing professional development training she works to have her design goal that the unit should be designed for learning not technology.
Next session was:
Privacy and EdTech Software -- Building Consensus and Minimizing Risk
Presenter:
- Bill Fitzgerald
Mr. Fitzgerald is part of CommonSense.Org (or Common Sense Media). His blog is at:
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/users/bill-fitzgerald/bio
His presentation will be available on his blog at some point soon. I'll be able to include more details once the presentation is posted since, once he made that announcement, I decided not to take more notes. A couple things he mentioned that I'll include now was an encouragement to do "phishing fire drills" (like the security presentation yesterday also advocated). Also lobbied for schools to get their communities to try and get to the point where people used password managers and not unencrypted spreadsheets or post-its or such totally non-secure methods.
Mr. Fitzgerald is also a strong proponent of doing what it takes to get one's school culture to accept ramped up password security including enterprise adoption of a password manager (he uses OnePass and also felt that LastPass was worth investigating).
One big question he posed was: Who -- or what process -- decides what educational software is used in the classroom? Who researches the Terms/Conditions as part of that software?
Sort of random security literacy question that he posed: do your faculty members know how to encrypt a flashdrive?
Following session 2 was the general session called:
A Look Into The Future: A Conversation About The Future of Education
Presenters:
- Brad Rathgeber -- Executive Director, Online School for Girls
- Kawai Lai - VP, Education Technology and Learning Services, NAIS
- Kevin Lewis -- Director of the Innovation Lab, First Data (Kevan said that First Data is a major player in the world of processing credit card use)
This was a general session devoted to a Q and A led by ATLIS Director Sarah Hanawald directed to the three folks listed above.
Some of the questions were chosen by Sarah and others came from tweets from the audience that were displayed on-screen during the conversation.
Afternoon "Deep Dive" I participated in was:
"Redesigning Professional Development: Come with a Question, Leave with a Plan"
Presenters:
- Kali Baird
- Ethan Delavan
- Kathryn Ulmer
This was a very interactive session where we participants were immediately divided up into small groups of two and asked to perform a number of exercises including coming up with our own super-hero moniker.
Geographical sidenote: Presenter Ethan is from Bush and participants Jeff Tillinghast (University Prep), Daisy Steele (Caitlin Gabel), and I (Lakeside School) were all participants from the Northwest!! So, at least in this session, the West Coast was amply represented!!!
