PLP+Workshops

**Faculty Enrichment Quid Pro Quo**
These workshops are designed to share what we have learned through our participation in the year-long "Powerful Learning Practice" program, which consisted of online seminars, face-to-face meetings, and frequent participation in online conversations with a community of learners. Our project for the program culminated in planning for the Senior Seminar and capstone project (tentatively called the Chinquapin Learning Edge), which will be implemented next year. We hope that the workshops we offer to the faculty in August and October will not only provide some new ways to think about teaching your courses but also will help prepare you to support our seniors in their efforts to create some truly remarkable projects. Ultimately, we hope that their focus on their senior project will help keep our seniors super-charged with a joy of learning throughout their time with us.

In addition to choosing two of the workshops below, you are invited to join the conversation about Daniel Pink's //Drive// at [|The Learning Edge][| (http://chinquapinlearningedge.blogspot.com/)] by commenting on the blogs posted throughout the summer by our rising seniors. We hope that your dialogue will provide the basis for more discussion at the faculty meetings in August. In addition, you are welcome to visit our wiki, where we forged our ideas for the project. You may be interested to read some of the resources we used and to see how our thinking evolved over time. (Note: You will be emailed a copy of this form so that you can access the links.)

**What Is 21st-Century Learning, and What Does It Have to Do with My Teaching? (Ray)**
We know the world is shifting around us and often embrace the changes technology has brought to our lives personally. So why do we resist change in our teaching pedagogy? What is 21st-century learning, really? Why is creativity the number one quality desired for new executives at IBM? What does this have to do with preparing our students to be successful in **their** future? What are some of the Web 2.0 tools you can use to immediately infuse your classes with relevant, powerful learning?

Transforming a Lesson (Dorothy)
During my time with PLP the adventure has been focused upon the Question-“Will this class, lesson, project (fill in the blank) be **beneficial****,** **stimulating**, and **memorable**?” In order to have a love of learning, I have learned that you must have all three in order for students to be on board. Now, my question is how should we, Chinquapin, do this? My group will do the following: 1. Choose a lesson that you and/or the students have difficulty with learning and teaching. 2. Research and find a tool that will help transform your lesson. 3. Meet in July, either online or face to face, and revamp the lesson. 4. Practice teaching the lesson in August with peers for suggestions and evaluations. 5. Teach the transformed lesson in the next calendar year (inviting me to come and observe). 6. Do a follow up student observation and self-evaluation.

Enhancing our Presentations (Jeremy D.)
As teachers, almost everyday we continue one of the oldest traditions in history: communicating new information to an audience. How does living in the 21st Century change the way we transfer knowledge from one person to another? A common way to enhance a presentation is by using a slideshow as a visual aid (i.e. PowerPoint). A slideshow can benefit a lecture and increase engagement if it is used properly. However, if our slides are too wordy, distracting, or hard to follow, our visual aid becomes more of a visual hindrance. This workshop will focus on how to use a visual aid more effectively, which will include some alternatives to PowerPoint (Prezi, Yudu). Students have little sense about personal property when dealing with media. This workshop will also give a brief overview of Copyright law, how this affects us as teachers, and good ways to model this for the students within our classrooms. It is especially important that we do this well, because the students often repeat what they see their teachers do.

**Research and Critical Reading with Social Bookmarking Tools (Dale)**
My presentation is about how to take advantage of Diigo in the classroom. Diigo, an abbreviation for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff," allows one to highlight articles, attach skicky notes, bookmark, tag and share articles with others in a group setting, once they’ve all signed up for it. It is not just for research articles, though this is the main thrust behind it. It can also be used for short stories, essays, poems, science or math articles and other pages of interest.

Learning is now, more than ever, a collaborative activity. Sharing what you learn with others -- teaching them, in essence -- is at the heart of the blog. But even as we share and teach, we also reflect and grow. Blogs give students access to a real audience (each other, the world) and allow them to build their thinking over time as others interact and comment. But this requires a new way of thinking about writing -- employing photographs and video, using tags, and "thinking short." You can learn how to start a blog, build a sense of community and audience, and incorporate "extras" (such as images) with a clear understanding of Copyright and Creative Commons. You will have an opportunity to see examples of blogs used in a variety of classes and to discuss practical issues like safety, oversight, and assessment. [|Blogger] (regular blogging) and [|Twitter] (micro-blogging) will be introduced.

**Web 2.0 Resources to Explore:**
[|Zotero] [|Diigo] [|Delicious]
 * Research Tools**
 * [|Zoho Notebook]

Sharing Ideas and Soliciting Feedback [|Twitter] [|Skype] [|Flickr]**