MMSA Middle Level Promise and Practice Summer Institute 2013

Summer Institute Session Descriptions

Registration Form

Note to Participants: Every participant should bring a computing device (laptop, iPad, etc.). Seating preference is small groups of 4 to 6. These will be very hands-on sessions. All participants should come prepared to think, discuss, and participate!

Designing for Our New Ecosystem (9:00 to 10:30 a.m.)
As educators, how can we be more intentional and purposeful about resolving incongruities between in-school learning spaces and out-of-school learning spaces? Out-of-school learning spaces are global; are often crowdsourced; are increasingly open/accessible/free; focus on creation/ participation, not just consumption; are active/interactive; etc. In-school learning spaces, not so much. But they COULD BE (with examples from real classrooms).

How Do We Know if Our Technology Integration is Any Good? (10:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.)
It's often difficult for us as educators to know whether technology usage by students and teachers is productive or just eye candy. This session will begin with a discussion of frameworks that help us think more deeply about effective technology integration. We then will apply those frameworks to multiple video scenarios that allow us to refine our understandings of powerful technology usage and how to better coach teachers.

Deeper Thinking, Technology Infusion, and Student Agency (1:00 to 2:30 p.m.)
It's difficult to create lessons that focus on deeper thinking, student agency, and rich technology infusion. In this session we will focus on the challenging task of operationalizing the high expectations we now have of classroom educators. Bring your construction helmet; we'll be doing complex lesson design work!

Scott McLeod, J.D., Ph.D., currently is serving as the Director of Innovation for Prairie Lakes Area Education Agency 8 in Iowa. He is on leave from his position as an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Kentucky. Dr. McLeod also is the Founding Director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE), the nation’s only academic center dedicated to the technology needs of school administrators, and was a co-creator of the wildly popular video series, Did You Know? (Shift Happens).

He has received numerous national awards for his technology leadership work, including recognition from the cable industry, Phi Delta Kappa, the National School Boards Association, and the Center for Digital Education. In Spring 2011 he was a Visiting Canterbury Fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Dr. McLeod blogs regularly about technology leadership issues at Dangerously Irrelevant and Education Recoded and occasionally at The Huffington Post. He also just completed his first book, What School Leaders Need to Know About Digital Technologies and Social Media.