VSTE

Virginia Society for Technology in Education

VDOE

Featured Resources from #GoOpenVA, September 14, 2020

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Swirl with word Go Open VASince its debut in January 2020, #GoOpenVA has been building its collections with the help of Virginia educators. This collaborative initiative enables educators and others throughout Virginia to create, share, and access openly-licensed educational resources (OER, also known as open education resources). OER are free digital materials that can be used or modified to adjust to student needs; they are openly-licensed unhampered by many traditional copyright limitations.

Jean Weller, VSTE Board Member and VDOE Technology Integration Specialist, leads this effort. We asked her to periodically curate a few of the resources to give a sense of what is available. Start with these but stay for so much more! And be sure to follow Jean on Twitter.

 

Featured Resources:

CS/CT Elementary

Rebecca Gratz of Loudoun has added two hyperdocs to use with integrated computer science at the elementary school level:

Digital Communication: https://goopenva.org/courseware/lesson/1188/overview

Eating Healthy: https://goopenva.org/courseware/lesson/1178/overview

Pre-K Internet Safety

Jennifer Sheppard of Giles has a quick way to incorporate internet safety into your morning meeting circle time with 3 and 4 year olds.

https://goopenva.org/courseware/lesson/2031/overview

Dan Meyer’s Three-Act Mathematics Problems

If you’re familiar with Dan Meyer and his approach to teaching mathematics, you’ll be happy to know you can find them quickly and easily on #GoOpenVA:  https://goopenva.org/browse?f.provider=dan-meyer-three-act-mathematics

Don't forget that most resources be saved and remixed so if they don't match your needs perfectly, you can change them. Then, be sure to reshare them so others can see the various versions of the resources.

Featured Resources from #GoOpenVA, August 31, 2020

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Swirl with word Go Open VASince its debut in January 2020, #GoOpenVA has been building its collections with the help of Virginia educators. This collaborative initiative enables educators and others throughout Virginia to create, share, and access openly-licensed educational resources (OER, also known as open education resources). OER are free digital materials that can be used or modified to adjust to student needs; they are openly-licensed unhampered by many traditional copyright limitations.

Jean Weller, VSTE Board Member and VDOE Technology Integration Specialist, leads this effort. We asked her to periodically curate a few of the resources to give a sense of what is available. Start with these but stay for so much more! And be sure to follow Jean on Twitter.

 

Featured Resources

Pratiquez les numéros

Aliya Headley from Hanover has been adding several lessons for World Language teachers.  This one is an idea for practicing numbers using student-owned technology and can be used in any language class!

https://goopenva.org/courseware/lesson/1550/overview

Virtual Field Trip in Scratch

Kim Wilkens provides a full story-based computer science lesson using Scratch, with lots of great helpful resources for teachers.

https://goopenva.org/courseware/lesson/1393/overview

AND THEN, Leslie James of Albemarle did a REMIX of the lesson, Virtual Field Trip in Scratch Remix (Regions of Virginia)

https://goopenva.org/courseware/lesson/2102/overview

You can choose which version works best for your students!

Featured Resources from #GoOpenVA

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SSwirl with word Go Open VAince its debut in January 2020, #GoOpenVA has been building its collections with the help of Virginia educators. This collaborative initiative enables educators and others throughout Virginia to create, share, and access openly-licensed educational resources (OER, also known as open education resources). OER are free digital materials that can be used or modified to adjust to student needs; they are openly-licensed unhampered by many traditional copyright limitations.

Jean Weller, VSTE Board Member and VDOE Technology Integration Specialist, leads this effort. We asked her to periodically curate a few of the resources to give a sense of what is available. Start with these but stay for so much more! And be sure to follow Jean on Twitter.

Featured Resources:

Decimal Rounding Podcast Episode (Mic Drop Maths Podcast): Two teachers (Lindsey Paulson and Whitney Wells-Corfield) in Hanover County collaborate to bring you their cool ideas on Mathematics SOL for 5th graders.  Broken into segments for easy “digestion,” it’s a way to get your own creative juices flowing. https://goopenva.org/courseware/lesson/496/overview

 

Blended Content Studio: This resource, created by Mike Caulfield of WSU Vancouver is full of great tips and videos to help teachers new to online learning.  Just one of the resources outside of Virginia that can be useful to Virginia educators trying to stay current during this crazy time.

https://goopenva.org/courses/blended-content-studio-emergency-online-teaching-at-wsu-vancouver/view

 

I Can Forecast the Weather Remix: Adrienne Sawyer of Chesapeake created a remix of a pretty simple lesson about recognizing clouds and made it much more robust for students, adding a great downloadable “Weather Journal” for students to use.

https://goopenva.org/courseware/lesson/1283/overview

Leading Ed Forum 2020: Collaboration in the Cloud

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logo Leading Ed Forum 2020: Collaboration in the Cloud: Innovations with Remote Learning
#explore-learn-innovate

Register Now

Schedule

Join the Virginia Department of Education and VSTE for the 4th annual Leading Ed Forum being held online on Tuesday, October 6, 2020,  from 8:15 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Registration Cost is $50.00.  This annual conference is designed for Virginia school division technology leaders and provides opportunities for technology leaders to learn more about issues related to both information technology and instructional technology. The 2020 Forum focuses on remote learning, digital learning, and network infrastructure. 

Entrepreneur Andrew Ko will provide the opening keynote for the Leading Ed Forum 2020. Andrew has spent the last 25 years of his professional career driving sales, business development, consulting, strategic partnerships and new product offerings for the most prominent  management consulting and technology companies in the world.

His industry experiences include education, auto, banking, defense, counterterrorism, and health and human services where he has received various awards in every company.  Focusing on his passion to improve education with technology. He founded Kovexa in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic to shape and lead the restructuring of education.

During COVID19, he was asked to advise Fairfax County Public Schools, Los Angeles County Unified School District and several universities and realized that the gap between technology, policy, and actual use by frontline educators was too great.  As a father, he realized the importance of equity, special needs, and English language learners have an insurmountable gap with online learning.

As an appointee to the Virginia State Board of Education, he assisted in setting statewide curriculum standards, establishing high school graduation requirements, determining qualifications for classroom teachers, and establishing state testing and assessment programs.

Because of the nature of this event, registration is limited to Virginia public and private school leaders who fall into the audience below. We encourage schools to send a leadership team.

Audience:  Technology Directors, Division Level leaders involved in Instructional Technology or Information Technology, Technology Coordinators, Supervisors of Technology, Directors of Information Technology, Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Coordinators of Instructional Technology, and  Directors of Innovation

Register Now

#GoOpenVA and Sharing In The Time of Crisis

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#GoOpenVA launched in late January, which turned out to be just in time. As Virginia educators move into several months of building closures due to COVID-19, we at least have a place to share and connect with other educators.

Although #GoOpenVA is designed as a repository of educational materials that teachers can edit and share, it is most importantly a community where teachers can rely on each other for help. That’s especially important now that we are all struggling to figure out a new way to help our students learn. The burden is so much lighter when we can share our ideas, rather than having to develop them all on our own.

So, now is the time for you to participate in #GoOpenVA. It is an open site, so if you are just looking for ideas, you can browse and download without any other action. However, to be a part of the community of sharing, you need to become as a registered user. For security reasons, Administration determined it was best if educators signed on through their school division, using a single-sign-on software.

Each school division has made their own determination about how to get to #GoOpenVA from their system, so check with your local tech support to find out the way you can get access. If your division does not have any sort of single-sign-on software, please contact us (info@goopenva.org) to request an account.

Once you are able to login as a registered user, you can do lots of things—add resources you’ve created, take someone else’s resource and tweak it to fit your students, participate in discussion groups about topics near and dear to your heart, and collaborate with your fellow educators to create something that’s bigger than just one person could do.

#GoOpenVA has a new User’s Hub, which will provide you with helpful tips and screencasts on how to do specific things on #GoOpenVA. This is a new space, so expect it to continue to grow over time. You are invited to add to this community, using the various Group message boards to share your own tips and insights.

We also have a 4-hour online self-paced course that you can take if that suits your learning style (sign up at Virtual Virginia; it may take a day or two to get your account set up). We also have our VSTE-supported Workshop in a Box materials for those who want to conduct a professional learning session for other educators. The latter will be expanding soon to incorporate new modules.

It’s a natural thing for educators to be sharers. After all, that’s what education boils down to – sharing our expertise and knowledge with students to help them grow (in all ways). It’s good thing that Virginia now has a place to support that sharing when we can’t get together physically!

Written by Jean Weller. Jean is an Educational Technology Specialist in the Virginia Department of Education's Office of STEM and Innovation. She also serves as the Department's representative on the VSTE Board of Directors.