We meet six of the graduating class of 2017 educators, and hear about their hopes, their dreams, and what their middle school selves have to tell them about teaching.

Full transcript available here: http://tiie.w3.uvm.edu/blog/pre-service-educators-podcast/#.WSQ3KjOZOHo

We talk with legendary awesome stats guy Mark Olofson -- now Dr. Legendary Awesome Stats Guy Mark Olofson -- about his research into adverse childhood events and school performance. It's some pretty important stuff, about how the intersecting traumas that affect students have some long-reaching consequences.

We talk with legendary awesome stats guy Mark Olofson -- *Dr.* Legendary Awesome Stats Guy Mark Olofson -- about his doctoral research into adverse childhood events and school performance. It's some pretty important stuff, about how the intersecting traumas that affect students have some long-reaching consequences.

Full transcript: http://tiie.w3.uvm.edu/blog/do-adverse-childhood-events-affect-student-performance/#

Wondering how to blend project-based learning with STEAM?

Yes, STEAM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math. Earlier this year we profiled The Cabot School's amazing public exhibition of sound sculptures highlighting water conservation. They were a big hit with the Cabot community, the students who made them and, it turns out, a fair number of you guys, too: our readers.

In this episode of The 21st Century Classroom, we talk with Cabot School educator Michael Hendrix. We hear about what it takes to pull off STEAM-powered PBL and why Hendrix feels you can't ever really teach science without art.

A full transcript appears below.

Michael Hendrix: We never use overhead lights. It kind of just… kids feel like it sort of sucks the soul out of the room. It’s sort of a gross feeling when you’re sitting under fluorescence, and so the stuff that we light the room with are these LEDs that we use with the AP Environmental Science class from two years ago when we did a project called Lillian, where we built a sustainable art and lighting sculptor piece to go with this folk opera that we were covering. We lit the room with all this alternative lighting and the kids won’t let me turn off the lights or won’t let me turn them on rather. So on darker days in the winter, this place is sort of like a pulsing, living thing. Yeah, it’s usually a pretty active place hence the mess.

Meet Michael Hendrix.

Hendrix: My name is Michael Hendrix. I'm a fifth-year teacher. This is my fourth year at Cabot School.  I teach Earth Science, Physics, Biology, AP Biology, Chemistry, AP Environmental Science, Maker Science this year, last year Statistics and Probability. I taught a senior experiential lab. I may be leaving something out.

What he's leaving out is that he tasked his current students with building Makey Makey-powered sound sculptures that helped raise awareness of water conservation and crisis. You might've heard about them on a previous episode of our podcast.

Students shared their sound sculptures with the Cabot community at a public exhibition, pairing their interactive art pieces with TED Talks on the water crisis. The community loved it.

We did too. So we set about asking Hendrix how he, as an educator, pulled this off with his students.

Hendrix: What students did is, we looked at the ideas behind fresh water and the water crisis, and all of the things that are happening with the world around preservation of water, and where are we going with the future of water, and in the process I knew my students needed to be doing some circuity and some basic programing. Also, learning how to build interfaces and sort of unpack basic programing.

So I came to them with the idea of, “Hey, let’s build an interactive art exhibit. It has to center around this idea of water, but in the process, let’s talk about what the things that you’re most interested in, in water.” So we looked at art. We looked at different installations of art just to help generate ideas; different water sculptures that other people had created in different contexts and different museums, to help to sort of prime them and get their brains going.

We also studied ambient music for a while too.

Wait. What does ambient music have to do with science?

Hendrix: So we were listening to Brian Eno’s early albums. Students were doing reviews on this music. We had a jam session with just our computers in here one day where we all tried to, without talking, communicate a certain sound or an idea, based on what that other person’s first note was that they played on their computer.

So we opened up GarageBand and had music typing up where we could play sort of a keyboard by using like ASDF, JKL. Students unpacked that and found out what sounds were dissonant and what sound...

Remember those interactive sound sculptures we profiled in Episode 26? Meet the teacher who made it happen, and hear how art is an inextricable part of physics, how Brian Eno can help teach circuitry, and how to keep play alive in science.

Full transcript: http://tiie.w3.uvm.edu/blog/steam-pbl-unit/

Student exhibitions of project-based learning

At this point we all know how important it is for students to share project-based learning with an authentic audience. It shows students they have power in the world, and that their research really makes a difference. But how best to design an exhibition that empowers students and provides a compelling, informative experience for the community?

Cabot High School did it by hosting an evening that combined student TED Talks, interactive sound sculptures and a high school funk band.

It. Was. Glorious.

In this episode of our podcast, we take you to Cabot High School's FLOW event, where you'll hear what it was like to connect with their community around water conservation PBL.

Student TED Talks, sound sculptures & the value of a good funk band at school exhibitions

Full transcript appears below.

For this episode of The 21st Century Classroom, we traveled to Cabot, Vermont, deep in the heart of rural Washington County, to hear how students at Cabot High School turned the study of water resources and environmental impacts into art, quizzes and TED Talk-style lectures for their community.

https://twitter.com/briantboyes/status/825120818703241217

This past Friday, students in Cabot’s Latin American Studies and Maker Science classes hosted an exhibition of learning. The students produced interactive quizzes on the environment, circuitry-powered research exhibits, and they gave TED Talks to a receptive and enthusiastic audience.

They had a student funk band, y'all.

And a whole bunch of their community showed up to listen, and learn.

Henry Burke: Hello everyone, my name is Henry Burke, and in my hand I am holding a simple apple. Can anyone guess how much water it takes to grow this single apple? Feel free to shout out some answers:

Man in the crowd: One gallon!

Henry: One gallon, all right...

Woman in the crowd: Three gallons!

Henry: Three gallons, okay…

Kid in the crowd: FIVE gallons?

*Multiple people shout guesses*

Henry: Ten gallons, fifty gallons-- It’s actually 18 gallons of water to grow this single apple.

Crowd: Whoa. *stunned silence*

Henry: Why do I mention this today? It’s all connected with the research my colleagues and I have done. Today, I will discuss agriculture and the water crisis: Drought. A very scary word for farmers, and a reality in the Mid-West. Today, in several states, it’s a word they’re using too often.

What's a TED Talk?

TED stands for “Technology, Education and Design”.  The non-profit TED organization conceived of TED Talks as short, powerful ways to spread ideas with real-world relevance and global significance. The idea is for speakers to present great, well-formed ideas in under 18 minutes.

And these particular TED talks were a huge success.

Rowan: Hello, and welcome. My name’s Rowan Lanxner. In America alone, around 34 million Xmas trees are cut down every year. I’d like to also ask the audience to shout out guesses about how many trees are cut down worldwide each year.

Various people in the crowd: Ten! ...A hundred million! ...Two million!

Rowan: About fifteen billion trees are cut down each year.

Crowd: Ooh.

Rowan: The Amazon rainforest is a vast forest that covers most of Brazil and the surrounding countries. It’s so enormous that it can cover the entire US and most of the countries in Europe. It’s so large that vast amounts of water are evaporating from it, creating most of its rainfall. The Amazon is so big, nothing can affect it, right? In reality, the Amazon is facing a crisis that affects us all: Deforestation.

https://twitter.

How to design a student exhibition that empowers students and provides a compelling, informative experience for the community? Cabot High School, in rural Cabot VT, did it with TED talks, sound sculptures and a funk band.

Vermont's new leading role online

In today's podcast, Mark Olofson talks with Joshua Rosenberg and Spencer Greenhalgh, education researchers from Michigan State University. Their research focuses on the state-level twitter conversations among educators: who is doing it, and what they're getting out of it.

And, spoiler alert, when they looked around the country, Vermont emerged as a pretty special place.

Connections. Sharing. We all thrive when we're able to talk with other folks who share common values and face common challenges. One way for educators to meet each other, talk about what they're doing, and share ideas is through social media. Here in Vermont, educators use the hashtag #vted to connect with each other on twitter.

This state educational twitter hashtag allows for local community-building and discussion where we share a common policy context. But this phenomena isn't unique to Vermont.

 

 

Mark Olofson: This is Mark Olofson with Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education and we’ve got a couple of other researchers with us today. Guys could you just tell us your names and where you’re at?

Josh Rosenberg: Yeah. Sure. I’ll go first if you don’t mind, Spencer. My name is Josh Rosenberg and I am a graduate student at Michigan State University and before graduate school I was a high school Biology and Earth Science and Chemistry teacher.

Spencer Greenhalgh: I’m Spencer Greenhalgh. I am also at Michigan State University. Josh and I are both in MSU’s Educational psychology and Educational Technology Program. I am in my fourth year there and where I do research on things like teacher's use of Twitter. Josh and I do a couple of different kinds of Twitter research actually but one area that we’ve really been interested in is what we call SETHs or State Educational Twitter Hashtags. We’re particularly interested in this because as local as you can get with Twitter… we talk about Twitter being something that can connect people from all across the world and that’s a wonderful ability that it has. But people are also using it in sort of geographically defined ways and we wanted to get a picture of what that looked like across the United States.

Josh Rosenberg: It’s cool. It’s ambitious. It’s inspiring. We don’t know a lot more about what to really make of this new opportunity, whether it’s for us as teachers to share resources we create or resources we find. Whether it’s a chance for us to connect with others. We came to this research largely through participating in the same communities, or the same hashtags in this case, and through participating in them we saw an opportunity to possibly collect data on what was going on and just start to create a portrait of what was going on, kind of as a first step and building on some kind of newer work on Twitter and education.

Mark Olofson: What types of things do you see educators doing on Twitter?

Josh Rosenberg: We see them tweeting a lot. Over six months we looked at lists of hashtags that other folks had created and we did our best to find a hashtag for every state and we found more than half a million tweets over six months. This is the first six months of 2015 and we have some more recent data including Vermont hashtag #vted, for this most recent year. But they’re talking about a lot of different things.

Spencer Greenhalgh: Teachers are using Twitter to build community and we expected this to be a sort of very professionally-driven thing and don’t get us wrong, it is but at the same time, we also saw teachers who are just shouting the breeze. They’re connecting with people that they haven’t seen in a while. Or maybe people that they only know through Twitter. They’re chatting and they’re having a good time. Anything from building community to also contributing to...

Resident stats guy and all-around smart person Mark Olofson talks with two researchers from Michigan State University. Their research focuses on the state-level twitter conversations among educators: who is doing it, and what they're getting out of it.

And, spoiler alert, when they looked around the country, Vermont emerged as a pretty special place.

What would you tell your neighbors about your school? What do you think they'd say in return? The Washington West Supervisory Union in the Mad River Valley of Vermont aims to find out by hosting a series of community conversations.

Life LeGeros, a longtime educator and WWSU community member, is taking part in those conversations, and sharing out what he learns.