K12LEADERS

Tag: #uen

  • Podcast Share – UEN Homeroom with Dr. Scott McLeod

    Podcast Share – UEN Homeroom with Dr. Scott McLeod

    If you go to ISTE23 in Philadelphia this year, make sure that you make some time for Playgrounds. ISTE Playgrounds are short table presentations made by experts all centered around the same topic.  These interactive sessions help everyone make personal connections to content and give you time to ask your questions to experts who can help you build your understanding.

    Case in point, at ISTE22 in New Orleans, I visited the Coaching Playground with a few of my Utah educator friends. They were coaches in a local district and I took them to this space to explore what coaches in other areas of the US are doing to help their teachers. While they were exploring different tables and listening to the presenters, I found myself at Dr. Scott McLeod’s table where he was discussing the 4 Shifts Protocol. If you are unfamiliar with the 4 Shifts, it is a companion piece to SAMR developed by Dr. McLeod and his colleagues. Where SAMR is a theoretical framework, 4 Shifts gives teachers direct questions to answer about their technology use in their learning environment to connect their pedagogy to their technology use. It provides a structure rather than just a framework. I had not heard too much about the 4 Shifts and immediately dug into Dr. McLeod and his work by asking a half dozen questions. It was great to talk to the direct expert about the content.

    Flash forward ten months, Dani and I had the pleasure and honor to bring Dr. McLeod, who is on sabbatical, to Homeroom to talk about deeper learning, the 4 Shifts, and what is working in schools. The episode was a rollercoaster as Dr. McLeod had a great answer for every point and brought in great research to back up his points. One point that kept cropping into my mind was Dr. McLeod’s work doing site visits to innovative schools across the country. For instance, you will hear him talk about an interdisciplinary school in Colorado that is working on clothes-washing solutions for astronauts. This project includes heavy use of STEM, but also English to document the work they are doing and provide ample backing for their process, CTE for the mechanical processes, and even social studies to understand the impact of prior missions. These schools are doing work that is very small in idea, but deeply expansive in how much they cover per project. Check out the full episode at this link.

    Also, check out Dr. McLeod’s great blog Dangerously Irrelevant, and his podcasts Redesigning for Deeper Learning and LeaderTalk.

  • Podcast Share – UEN Homeroom UCET23 Reflection

    Podcast Share – UEN Homeroom UCET23 Reflection

    I attended my first UCET in 2018. I had just come back from SXSWEDU week and I was on fire for more ideas and community. At the suggestion of my good friend, Quin Henderson, I headed to the University of Utah and joined the conference. I was excited to talk to a lot of the speakers as part of our podcast project at the time, Edtrex Rewind, and to just take in the conference. It was the first time that I had attended a state-level education conference and I was tickled by how much fun I had throughout the event. Over the next few years, I presented at UCET and engaged with the larger community through #UTedchat on Wednesday nights.

    In 2020, I applied to be on the board. I didn’t think I would make it. There had to be more qualified educators and community members that were available to help out with the conference, but to my deep surprise, while in a meeting to figure out the best way to approach the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic, I found out that I was on the board. Now, just a few years later, I was lucky enough to be elected president and to run the conference. This year’s conference was the culmination of a lot of goals for myself and for the board. We wanted to have a larger community represented at the conference. We wanted national figures at the conference to interact with Utah educators. With the inclusion of ULEAD, the Utah Teacher Fellows, the Friends of the Salt Lake City Public Library, the STEM Action Center, Show Up for Teachers, USBE, and UEN we brought a larger swath of Utah organizations to share their work with the conference, but we also were able to bring in national figures and organizations including Eric Curts, Sundance, Dan Ryder, Micah Shippee, Dee Lanier, Darren Hudgins, The Modern Classrooms Project, and more to the conference. In conjunction with that, we were able to move forward with moving to a larger venue for the 2024 conference and to make the president a two-year position, which means I get another shot next year.

    Dani and I were able to sit down with some great field recordings from the conference and discuss the conference and UCET’s impact on both of us, Dani as a past president and me as the current president. We hit a lot of the great moments from the conference, both in 2023 and from prior years. Listen in to be introduced to the best education conference in Utah and prime yourself for 2024! Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

    https://uen-homeroom.simplecast.com/episodes/post-ucet-teacher-review-UctQ3gAc