Putting it All Together: STEAM + PBL

Two big ideas in education today: STEAM and PBL. STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math and PBL stands for Project-Based Learning. So, how can these two ideas work together? Andrew Miller states in his article, PBL and STEAM Education: A Natural Fit, “With a push for deeper learning, teaching and assessment of 21st-century skills, both PBL and STEAM help schools target rigorous learning and problem solving.” He gives some suggestions on how they can work together:

• [Move] Design Challenges to Authentic Problems - Take a classroom design challenge that meets the STEAM goals and find a way to relate it to something the students know.
• 21st Century Skills - The 4Cs - creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication. These skills most common to PBL are a natural fit for STEAM as well.
• Integrated Disciplines - Marrying STEAM and PBL allow educators to fill gaps and capitalize on each philosophy's strength.

Charles R. Drew Charter School in Atlanta is making this a reality. The charter school is a STEAM-focused school and teachers are using PBL to make the learning authentic to the students.

Here’s how these teachers and students are working to make this initiative successful:

• Getting Started With Planning - Come up with one driving topic for each grade level that will be the focus of each quarter.
• Identifying Standards and What Students Need to Know - Look at state and national standards and identify how they can be addressed through your topic.
• Creating the Driving Question - Inform the question based on the standards, real-world application, and with the end in mind.
• Providing an Authentic Audience - Help students connect with their audience and relate to the problem.
• Making the Project Authentic - Connect the driving question to a local event or problem that impacts their students and their community and let them work towards a solution.
• Sustaining Inquiry - Connect your content standards to the project.
• Encouraging Student Choice and Voice - Let students come up a solution to the problem and determine the best way to present it.

Students at Charles R. Drew Charter School are interested in what's happening in the world and engaged in their own learning. The integrated approach of STEAM and PBL allow them to take ownership of their education and see how they'll apply it later in life.

Pepper Professional Development Courses and the Resource Library can help you create a more engaged and active classroom that includes STEAM learning concepts and can help with a Project Based Learning approach to instructional delivery. We’re adding new courses and resources regularly, so be sure to check them out.

February 17 is Digital Learning Day!

The advancement of technology has provided unprecedented access to information and has allowed people to research, learn, and share like never before. Digital Learning Day celebrates the use of digital technology in learning, and in particular, highlights the innovative and forward-thinking use of technology for learning in the classroom. Created by the Alliance for Excellent Education in 2012, Digital Learning Day (DLDay) is a nationwide celebration that highlights great teaching and demonstrates how technology can improve student outcomes.

There are a variety of ways that you can participate in DLDay. Ashley Cronin, a Digital Resource Curator for Edutopia, notes of several ways teachers and schools can get involved:

• Conduct digital-learning activities and share these with the world. Go paperless for the day, participate in a Google Hangout, get students coding-- the options are endless!
• Set up showcases of digital student work.
• Share information about digital-learning resources, tools, and strategies.
• Get online and on social media to spread the word about digital learning.

Cronin also encourages interested teachers to visit the Digital Learning Video Gallery on the website for the Alliance for Excellent Education. Here educators can "view real-life, practical stories about how district and school leaders are improving learning outcomes through effective use of technology."

The Alliance for Excellent Education has planned a full day of of live digital events that will explore the state of digital equity in schools and communities across America. A complete schedule is below. Click on a session to access additional details.

February 17, 2016: Digital Learning Day Schedule (All Times Eastern)
10:00 – 10:30 a.m.	Digital Equity and Access: Connecting Students Beyond School
11:00 – 11:20 a.m.	Digital Equity and Leadership: Creating a Culture of Equity and Innovation
12:00 – 12:20 p.m.	Digital Equity and Teacher Preparation: Improving the K–12 Teaching Pipeline
2:00 – 2:20 p.m.	Digital Equity and College/Career Readiness: Diversifying Students in STEM
3:00 – 3:20 p.m.	Digital Equity and Instructional Quality: Transforming Teaching Through Technology
4:00 – 4:20 p.m.	Digital Equity: The Road Ahead

Schools and educators can also visit the Digital Learning Day website to sign up their event and find out more about what educators are doing across the country to celebrate DLDay. Here you will find contests, videos, and online resources.

Pepper Professional Development Courses and the Resource Library can help you create a more engaged and active classroom that includes digital learning - for you and for your students. We’re adding new courses and resources regularly, so be sure to check them out.

Pepper Highlight: Using Google Hangouts with Pepper

One of the great features of Pepper is the access to teachers from around the country. The Pepper online learning community provides opportunities to discuss and collaborate with educators on a wide variety of professional endeavors. But did you know that you can also collaborate via Google Hangouts? You can use Hangouts to send messages, make voice and video calls, and share photos. Edutopia article, Using Google Hangouts for Teacher Development states, “Google Hangouts is a perfect tool to increase the level of communication and professional development in every school.” Teachers are busy and finding time to meet with colleagues for collaboration can be challenging. Google Hangouts can make meeting easier by creating a flexible environment for conversation and planning.

Google Hangouts enables both one-on-one chats and group chats with up to ten people at a time using a Google account or email. While somewhat similar to Skype, FaceTime and Facebook Video Chat, Google Hangouts focuses more on "face-to-face-to-face" group interaction as opposed to one-on-one video chats, and utilizes sophisticated technology to seamlessly switch the focus to the person currently chatting. The use of Google Hangouts in the education setting has a lot of potential. Sharing is powerful. By using Google Hangouts teachers can create virtual classroom visits and use what they learn to build instructional practices. In addition to video chatting, Google Hangouts users can share documents, scratchpads, and images with other users.  Turn any Hangout into a live video call with up to 9 of your peers and your conversations just flow from text-to-video/voice-and-back, in a matter of clicks. 

To access your Hangout within your Pepper Course, click on the "Live Hangout" link to bring up the "Create a New Hangout" screen.

Create a New Hangout- Press the green button to start your own personal study group and invite others via email to join you.

Your Pepper Learning Community and Pepper Courses are a great place to find other educators to share both classroom experiences and learning opportunities. Utilizing the experience and skills of teachers from around the country can provide unique opportunities for networking and sharing lesson ideas and classroom management tips.

Using Digital Tools to Individualize Instruction

As part of their Extending the Digital Reach report, Education Week also published an article highlighting how ed-tech tools are changing the ways in which teachers can differentiate their literacy and reading instruction. This report, Digital Tools Aim to Personalize Literacy Instruction, focuses on how new technologies can transform learning by providing individualized instruction. Education Week talked with Graphite, a division of Common Sense Media, and a Pepper partner, to gain insight on some of these new tools.

Graphite specializes in providing teachers and schools with free research-based classroom tools. They provided some suggestions for helping teachers create personalized literacy opportunities for students. Here are some of their recommendations:

1. Customize Texts to Each Student's Reading Level - Online programs such as Raz-Kids and Newsela provide topical reading at a variety of levels.
2. Allow Teachers to Target Specific Reading Skills - Apps, such as Lexia Reading Core5, are now available that allow teachers to target reading skills that students need to develop.
3. Diagnose and Respond to Individual Students' Strengths and Weaknesses - Software, such as Read 180, will analyze a student’s reading and then provide additional texts and vocabulary based on their assessment results.
4. Encourage Teachers to Offer Customized Supports - “Digital tools and interactive e-readers can also allow teachers to customize the reading experience for students—and make themselves an integral part of each student's reading process.”
5. Have Students Show What They've Learned in Different Ways - Differentiation. Tools such as, BookBuilder, give students opportunity to write, edit, and publish their own writing and ideas.

Technology can provide support and opportunity for students to experience learning on a level that they understand. It gives teachers an opportunity not to just “teach to the middle”, but to teach each student as they need for learning and understanding.

Pepper Reading Courses are available to help you apply new literacy instruction concepts to your classroom. Also, be sure to check out Graphite in the Pepper Resource Library to find technology tools to meet the needs of individual students.

Ed Tech and Early Learners

Most educators can agree that technology is here to stay, and that 21st-century classrooms and schools cannot afford to pretend otherwise, or they risk letting their students fall behind in an increasingly tech-integrated world. Yet the magnitude and the role of technology in learning--especially when it comes to preschoolers--are not always clear, and experts often have differing ideas about how much tech is too much tech for the earliest learners.

If you're interested in exploring some of the issues--from studies about the impact of screen time on early brain development to a list of best technology integration practices for educators working with early learners--then take a look at this article from Education Week: "Proper Role of Ed Tech in Pre-K a Rising Issue." It surveys some of the questions and challenges surrounding ed-tech and early learners, and offers links to some helpful resources.

Here are a few more places to read up on the issues:

• The nonprofit group Sesame Workshop offers a list of research-driven BEST PRACTICES for tablet use with preschool children.
• Check out the POSITION STATEMENT from the National Association for the Education of Young Children and the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media.
• Take a look at the FAQ PAGE on CHILDREN AND MEDIA from PBS.org.

These are important questions to be asking as educators--start exploring the research and the ideas, and get involved in the conversation!

Digital Learning Activities and Educational Games -- Free!

As every teacher knows, not all educational games are created equal! Some have genuine value and can serve as wonderful reinforcements for student learning, or can expand student learning beyond the classroom. Yet how do you find educational games and digital learning activities that have been vetted and curated without spending hours of your own time testing them, or paying for memberships?

Check out this fantastic website: Powermylearning.org! It's a free digital learning platform with resources for teachers, students, and parents alike, and was developed by the well-respected national education nonprofit CFY. If you're looking for games, videos, interactives, and other digital resources to incorporate into your Common Core lesson plans for the classroom, then this is the website for you.

Each resource in Math and ELA is aligned directly to a Common Core standard. Plus, there are countless resources for science, social studies, the arts, technology and more. You'll need to create an account to access all the material on the site, but once you do, you'll be able to tap into hundreds of carefully-vetted, free digital resources.

Ed Tech To Help Support Formative Assessments

By now every educator is familiar with the importance of formative assessments when it comes to understanding and meeting student needs in a flexible, ongoing way. Making good use of formative assessments is a huge part of the the transition to Common Core State Standards (CCSS)--but what are some ways that educators can do this in the midst of busy days and dense lesson plans? Check out this review by ed tech expert Jeff Knutson on graphite.org. He gives a great run-down of ten useful tools and applications that may help support efforts to incorporate formative assessment practices into the classroom--effortlessly!

(Please note that PCG does not endorse or have ties to any of these products).