Reflection

It’s time to close out the Apple Learning Coaching Cycle with the final step, reflection. Allowing time in between the prior step, action, and the final step, reflection, allows for both the coach and mentee to provide more meaningful answers about the processes and results from the current coaching cycle. It allows for a more logical reflection of the cycle versus a more emotional one.

Once again Apple provides Apple Learning Coaches the tools such as the Reflection Guide, to get the most out of your colleague’s reflection. The guide has your colleague reflect on what they felt went well and what could have been different.

You can use these reflections to better your practices as well as prepare for the next coaching cycle.

New School Year, New Grade

After 5 years of being a professional 3rd grade, I have begun a new journey into the 5th grade. It has been 6 weeks since the start of the school year for us, and I am growing accustomed to my new grade level. A have a small class of 11 students 9 of them have been together since at least 1st grade. I taught this class as 3rd graders and I must say it is amazing to see the growth in them. 5th graders are much more capable of working on more complex projects independently then 3rd graders.

While I miss knowing the curriculum almost by heart, I am enjoying the challenge of learning new topics. I am also enjoying teaching Computer Science to my 5th graders and they seem to be enjoying learning about the history of computers.

OMG OMG OMG

Well, it happened yesterday afternoon, Apple sent out the emails to perspective ADEs. I was fortunate enough to have been chosen. I feel a deep gratitude for the recognition. I know that this is something I could not have achieved without the support and encouragement of the Apple Education Community.

I wish there was a way to recognize all the amazing educators that submitted an application. I know from personal experience that receiving the “not selected” email is hard emotionally:  we invest a lot of time and effort in making the videos, hoping that we selected the correct innovations to share.

I was stunned when I received the selected email this afternoon, and after “talking” with other educators about what they are doing in their classrooms and school, I felt that maybe I had not shown as many innovations as I thought I had. After seeing previous ADE classes videos I began to think that maybe my video was not creative enough. In the end though it was and for that I am grateful.

For all of those who did not get selected in this round, do not give up. Keep innovating, sharing, and stay positive, your turn will come. Hopefully, it won’t be another 4 years until the next class.

For those who will be in Texas is summer, I am looking forward to meeting and working with you. I think that our world is about to get a lot bigger and brighter. I am honored to have been selected to be in a class with you.

Getting Closer…..

As I write this post, there are many educators that are anxiously refreshing their inboxes waiting for a short email from Apple, hopefully announcing them as being invited to the Apple Distinguished Educator class of 2023 Institute this summer. I know that I am one of these educators.

Just last Friday the emails inviting current ADEs to welcome the Class of 2023 went out. Congratulations to those ADEs that will be attended. That also put everyone else waiting for a notification on alert. My guess is probably this Friday around 5pm PST. I do hope its sooner as I don’t know if I can last that long!

ADE 2023 Application

Hi Friends! Well my ADE 2023 application has been submitted and the application window closes tomorrow. It was a very fast and furious race to the end, but I am happy to have gone through the process, whatever the result. Applying for the ADE program and creating the video, allows for you to reflect on your teaching practices. I was able to better see what impacts that I make at my school with both staff and students.

This time for reflection also helps me to identify area where I feel that I am deficient and in need of assistance. I noticed in the pictures and videos that I hade not labeled certain areas of my class, which has now been taken care of, yay me! Being a professional 3rd grader, until next school year when I teach 5th grade for the first time!, I would like to give myself two wishes and a star. Wish one - I wish that my students would be able to take their iPads with them, I think that would really expanded their creative options when doing an assignment, being limited to just the classroom and school grounds, you see a lot of the same items and scenery in all the assignments. Wish two - the my current students were introduced to creating with the iPad before reaching me. We spent a lot of time going over the basics of the iPad and the applications, it takes away from the precious limited time that we have. Now this may become a reality in the next school year when I begin to implement the Apple Learning Cycle on the earlier grades. Finally my star - I would have to say how well the Everyone can code curriculum is going with this class. They continue to amaze me with what they can do and how quickly they have picked it up. It really is a sight to see.

Working the Data

As an Apple Teacher and  now Apple Learning Coach I enjoy attending the Apple Live Learning Conferences hosted on Mondays and Thursdays throughout the year. They provided new insights into different Apple products and activities in the classroom. Their are many classes that they offer on a rotating basis.

Recently they had a class titled Research for Educators. This name can sound intimidating at first. The last time that I did any research was when I was working on my masters degree and that was tedious.

  Well, after taking the class and going through the book, I was pleasantly surprised. The research studies in the book were easy to follow, and provided feedback on your class and your teaching almost immediately.

It is a relatively short book, around 43 pages, but it is filled with all sorts of great information. There are 7 different research studies listed in the book that you can follow along with: student attitude towards learning, student engagement, student achievement, student creativity, student experience and learning initiative, deeper learning, and creative environment. Some of these studies can be done in a single class and some may take a bit longer to gather the necessary data.

Each of these studies provides a scenario for the survey as well as examples of the questions that you want to answer, what benefits the study can provide, specific details about the study such as how long it will take, what grades it works best for, and suggested apps to use. It then explain the steps to conduct the study. Apple provides example topic prompts, but you are more than welcome to use your own.

Once you have conducted the study you will need to analyze your data, and Apple has your back there too. They have provided template for rubric, entering data, and visualizing your data. This is all done in Pages and Number of course, and yes, you can modify and customize as you like to you and your school’s or districts preferences.

From there Apple provides some prompts for you to use to reflect on the information that the survey too reveals about your teaching practices and provides a path to improvement.

Overall this is a great class and book of any educator to look into if they are wanting to see what type of learning is going on in their classroom.

ADE Class of 2023 application now open.

Hi 👋🏼 friends! Exciting news! Apple has started the Apple Distinguished Educator Class of 2023 application process. There is an online form to complete and a 2 minute video to submit. The deadline is March 23. More information can be found here.

Good luck!

Everyone can Code

Today’s topic is Everyone Can Code, Apple’s coding curriculums. I say curriculums because they have early learners, Elementary, and high school level curriculums. They even have resources to start a Swift Coding Club and hold an hour of code session independently of the full curriculum.

The early learner, elementary, hour of code, and coding clubs all use Swift Playgrounds on the iPad. The upper elementary and high school curriculums start to transition to using a Mac and Xcode.

In this article I am going to focus on the early learner and elementary levels as that is what I have the most experience with.

Why teach coding? It’s an important question at a time where we as educators have so many things we need to cover. Coding can enhance and encourage critical thinking skills. While you may think that coding is all technical, it also develops creative thinking skills. Sometimes to solve a problem in code you have to think creatively and outside of the box. Additionally, some of the lessons correspond to Everyone can Create lessons. Coding is a collaborative effort. Pair programming (where two coders work together to solve a problem) is used in the professional coding world and it works in the classroom as well. It aides in independence and team building. After I explained that helping each other solve these problems is the best way to learn, the students in my classroom came up with their own “help queue!”

The Everyone Can Code curriculums have accessibility in mind so all your kids can learn to code. All videos include closed captioning as well as speakers who also sign using American Sign Language. The puzzles in the various lessons include tactile layouts.

As expected, the curriculum starts with the basics. Apple has thought ahead and before you get into passing out iPads, starting up apps, and typing in code, you’re going to lead your students through a physical, device free activity to learn about a computer science/programming concept.

The first chapter is about commands. Basically, how to tell the computer how to do something. The activity has the kids hiding an object in the classroom or outside and then writing a list of commands that must be followed by another student to find the hidden object. This activity reinforces the idea that the computer is limited in what it can and can not do, and that students must tell it line by line, command by command.

There is a physical activity for each chapter in the book, as well. Each chapter covers a different aspect of learning to code.

The teacher edition of the curriculum includes all the links for the exercises, activities, presentations, and videos.

Each chapter is broken down in four parts:

• Learn: you watch a video and then do direct instruction and discuss the programming concept as a group.

• Try: the students take what they have learned in the chapter and use it to solve a coding puzzle in Swift Playgrounds.

• Apply: students then use the concept they’re learning and apply it to their own small assessment, which may be done on the iPad in Swift playgrounds or a question they answer on paper in the book.

• Connect: now, they take these concepts and apply them to real world situations. One example would be taking your students on a field trip to an Apple Store to watch a presentation, then the students discuss what they can use in their own coding presentations.

The Swift Playground is a simple to use, but powerful enviroment. The lessons are incorporated into a playground layout, which is a kid friendly interface. It has the goals of the lesson listed and below that, one half of the screen has the steps and hints to solve the puzzle, with the puzzle and character the students are controlling on the other half of the screen. When you first start, the commands are listed in a shortcut bar so the kids can just tap on the command they want to add into their program, so there is no need to memorize or type which makes it nice for our youngest coders. As they progress through the chapters more commands are added and the kids begin to make their on functions as well.

There are a total of 10 lessons in the puzzles book that cover the basics of coding in Swift. They include: commands, functions, for loops, variables, conditional code, types and initialization, functions with parameters, logical operators, while loops, and finally arrays and refactoring. Each of these concepts build off the previous ones. By the time you have completed the book you will have full fledge coders on your hands!

The Swift Coding Club is a close proximity to the Everyone Can Code curriculum format, but it is broken into smaller segments for shorter club meetings. You should be able to fit in a session  during your lunch time. There are downloadable resources to help you get the club up and running. The downloadable resources also include templates for decals to make t-shirts, stickers, posters, and completion certificates.

Finally, the Hour of Code is a single lesson,

annual lesson that focuses on one coding topic to get the students into Swift Playgrounds and coding quickly. There is a separate booklet for this program.

The Everyone Can Code curriculum makes it easy to incorporate teaching code into your school day without having to do a lot of prep. The benefits to our students learning to code will help enhance their critical and creative thinking skills, which can be applied across the curriculum and beyond.

The Plan Step (part 1)

Hi 👋🏼 friends!

The plan step is where you take your colleague's goals, requirements, success criteria, and time frame, then add your expertise. Together you will determine what steps are going to be needed to achieve success. Finally, you need to decide what activities will be most beneficial to your colleague so they meet their goals.

Looking at the Plan quadrant of the Coaching Cycle Canvas, you see that we will need some vital information from our colleague to complete it. We need a start date and expected completion date. From there the coach and colleague will create a list of activities, determining what the coach is responsible for and what the teacher is responsible for. Finally, it needs to be decided when and where will the activity happen. There is also an area to include the coach's notes and thoughts.

To gather and organize this information, Apple provides a Planning Template in the Coaching Library. This is helpful to use with your colleague to brainstorm and gather information, which you will then transfer to the plan quadrant of the Coach Cycle Canvas.

To begin with the Planning Template we want to list the top and secondary priorities for the coaching cycle. Remember your colleague can have more, but we want to be sure to keep it reasonable.

Next, we need to plan out what steps need to be taken to achieve their goals. These are not the activities that we plan to help with the technology, but rather what general steps need to be taken to ensure that our colleague has the skills necessary to successfully cover their lesson objectives.

Here are some questions from the Planning Template, folloed by supplemental questions you may want to ask:

What resources will you need to accomplish each goal?

Will you need a lesson plan, templates, equipment,…?

As your coach, what can I do to help you reach your goals? (a lot of these will become The activities that you do to aid your colleague)

How much support are you going to need or want from me?

What type of technical help will you need, and what kind of hands-on help will you need to add creativity to the lesson?

What needs to be prepared to measure success?

Do you need to have surveys or assessments created? Do you need a rubric?

What type of support will you need when learning new technology?

With this information, you can complete the Planning Template from the Coaching Library and then move to the specific coaching activities that you and your colleague determine to be most effective.

Once all of this information is gathered or determined, you can then transfer it to the Plan quadrant of the Coaching Cycle Canvas.

Apple also provides a few additional paper-based tools to use during the Plan stage:

The Coaching Cycle Teacher Tracker, where you track your work with a specific teacher throughout the cycle.

The Coaching Cycle Schedule to help you keep track of all of your colleagues going through a coaching cycle with you.

Self-care and Apple Fitness Plus

Hi friends! As we all know working in education is stressful. Between teaching, planning, staff meetings, parent meetings, and decorating classrooms and bulletin boards, it can become overwhelming. According to Dr. Barata “Self-care in essence is the mindful taking of time to pay attention to you, not in a narcissistic way, but in a way that ensures that you are being cared for by you.” A shorter more lay version would be self-care is taking care of yourself mentally and physically.

There are many options for educators to self-care. Almost a month ago I put out a poll on Twitter asking for responses as to how you self-care, by far the largest response at 43% was for exercise, followed by 26% for reading, 22% for other, and 9% for meditation. That was with a total of 23 votes, so I really can say statistically how accurate those percentages can carry over. For me, I exercise and practice mindfulness/meditation on a daily basis.

For running and walking, I use the Workout App on the Apple Watch. I love to listen to the Time to Walk and Time to Run workouts. The Time to Walk sessions have wonderful and interesting stories to take my mind off whatever is going on and the Time to Run is motivating, positive, and fun I am so busy trying to keep up that I don’t have time to think about whatever is going on. The music on both of them is incredible. I have found a lot of newer music and older songs that I have added to my Apple Music library. Time to Walk and Time to Run are released on a weekly schedule. These two are listed under the Audio workouts and are under the Apple Fitness Plus service. The service also offers a multitude of other workout types that your can go through on your AppleTV, iPad, or iPhone. I have done a few of the different type of workouts and they are all high quality with different instructors and designed for different fitness levels. If I am not listening to them then I am either doing an open walk or an open run. I prefer using the Workout app over other fitness apps because for me it provides an amazing amount of fitness data, especially after the last iOS update and works well integrating with the health app.

For mindfulness and meditation, I use the mindfulness app on the Apple Watch for a quick session and I have been using the meditation sessions on Apple Fitness Plus for more in-depth reflection. For those, I use my iPhone which is  connected to my Apple Watch, so it displays my heart rate on the screen for me to check, if I have my eyes open. The Apple Fitness Plus service has mindfulness/meditation sessions on many different topics and they have many different instructors that guide you through the lesson. Personally my favorite instructor is Jessica. She seems very approachable and has a wonderful accent. Let’s switch to the times when you need some immediate mindfulness.

The mindfulness app on the Apple Watch is wonderful in that you have it where ever you are. Dealing with a stressful situation or day? Find someplace where you can reset your mind and take some breaths. You can do a quick 1 to 5-minute session. The Apple Watch will use haptic feedback to tell you when to inhale and exhale. You can do this almost anywhere, I have done a quick 1-minute breathing session in the middle of a lesson when things were going off the rails. It helps to bring your focus back to the present. Finally, I’ll briefly cover reading for self-care.

While I have really never considered reading as a method of self-care, I can now see how it is. I use my iPhone and iPad to read and listen to audio books on that I purchase through the Apple Book Store. This way I have my books with me anywhere I go. I can also play books in my car using the Apple Books CarPlay App. I can also play an audiobook on my Apple Watch without my iPhone if I have synced it over.

Ice Breakers

An icebreaker is a type of ship designed with a reinforced haul so as to plow through thick sea ice of the arctic, Antarctic and other ovens that have lots of ice. But that’s not the cool type of ice breaker I’m talking/ranting about today.

Today I’m talking about that good old fun time staff meeting activity.

For those of you who love ice breakers, god bless you!

I am not one of those people and I am not afraid to admit it or show it with a sarcastic eye roll at the mention of one.

Don’t get me wrong, ice breakers do have a time and a place. Do you have a room full of new hires who don’t know each other, but will be together for the next few days or week? Boom! An ice breaker is a way to get people to know one another.  Got people from all over the country who rarely if ever talk, there you go perfect ice breaker material.

Where ice breakers fall flat for me is when you are in a meeting with people that you work with day in and out for 3 years. You talk everyday and know everything about each other. What is an ice breaker really going to do there? Holy moly Joel’s favorite breakfast treat is now French toast and not waffles????? How did I not know this? How will I go on??? Plus, Joel it’s alway waffles!

Yeah, no……..

For small school environments where staff member see each and talk to each other everyday an ice breaker is not honoring or showing us that our time is valuable. Teachers have just been through a day teaching the last things some of us want to do is to share some random bit of information with people who know all about us, just so they can…..what?know what my favorite office item is? My red stapler, I have no clue.

For me, please honor my time as an educator and after the pre-meeting snacks please get right to the agenda topics for the meeting. the sooner we can get through this meeting, the sooner we can go back to grading, lesson planning, emailing parents, sweet talking the copier to to working for us, learning about the newest pedagogy or educational technology must have. The sooner we can get back to have conversations with our co-workers and friends about meaningful topics to us, not just what our favorite ice cream flavor is. Mine would be chocolate if you’re wondering.

The inquire

The first step into the coaching system is inquire and what better way to start that then with a kickoff meeting! It is a great way to build a working relationship with a colleague that you don’t know or haven’t worked with before. This is an informal meeting to get to know one-another and discuss what coaching is about. Apple provides a meeting guide template which is a good starting point. When having this meeting you want to be sure to use a lot of open ended questions to start the conversion and get information from your colleague, then move to closed ended questions to narrow certain issues down.

You could always start with an ice breaker.  I dislike them greatly, like more than greatly, but some people live for them, to each their own. From there you want to share a little bit about each other. It could be all professional information or you may wish to share some personal information as well. Then your colleague takes a turn. Now at this point you need to be doing more than just sitting there nodding you head. You want to be employing your active listening skills and taking notes. This is where you begin to find out your colleague’s background and attitude towards teaching and technology.

Next, we want to talk about what coaching is and is not. We want to stress that the coaching is a tool for professional learning and growth. It is not an evaluation tool and you, as a coach, have no input in evaluations. We will delve more into what this professional relationship looks like next.

We transition in talking about how this will be a partnership. We want our colleague to come away with the idea that both of you will being working towards their goal. They will learn from you and you will learn from them and there will be things that you learn together through this cycle. Your colleague will be bringing their experience and ideas into conversations and you’ll be bringing your ideas on integrating technology and creativity into student learning.

Now we want to do a brief overview of the coaching cycle for our colleague, starting with the name and goal for each step:

Inquire - helping you to identify a goal

Plan - helping you to create a plan to reach that goal

Act - you implementing the plan and I’m there to help you

Reflect - we’ll talk about how it went and what the next steps should be

And finally, technology!! Yes, we finally talk about technology not about how awesome your are with it, but what is their comfort level using technology on a scale of 0 to 5. You can also ask about general technology use or specific apps or devices.

Finally, we want to allow time for our colleague to ask any questions that we may not have covered. We would also set a time for starting the inquire step together.

At the next meeting with your colleague you’re going to be asking questions, a lot of questions, to determine what they want to achieve in this coaching cycle. Again you want to start with more open ended questions and switch to closed ended ones to narrow the focus. Apple again provides some excellent guiding questions to help you and your colleague determine what a successful cycle looks like; these questions will range from what type of creative projects student have done in the past, what the lesson objectives are to what type of support your colleague and students will need before and during the lesson.

Once you have this and possible more information your colleague will want to come up with at least two goals that they want to achieve in the cycle, they can have more, but its smart to keep it to a realistic number to start, and yes, you can help them determine a goal, but you don’t want to be the one making it up for them.

From there is it time to write up the goals, actions, deadlines, and what evidence there will be to prove success. They are written from your colleges point of view, what they want to do for each goal. The action will describe what they will do to achieve the goal, the deadline is one determined by them, so a date at minimum. Then a description of what success will look like to your colleague. I would recommend writing these in the SMART format or something similar.

With that the inquire step is complete and you move on to plan. The step where you write out what activities will happen when.

This is an excellent foundation to a coaching  program at any school or district.

Some thoughts on being an Apple Learning Coach

An Apple Learning Coach values building relationships and trusts with co-workers. Being a coach is more than just showing your peers how to add technology to their lessons. A coach needs to listen to their peers and see what goals they have that the coach can help them achieve. The coach is there as a partner, a mentor, a guide, and sometimes a push out of the comfort zone we all teach in. It cannot be stressed enough that people, relationships, and trust have priority over technology. Once that relationship and trust have been established and built, you commonly use the tools and lessons found in the Everyone Can Create, and Everyone Can Code curriculums to start a peer on their journey of engaged teaching and learning. Why those two curriculums? Both have projects that have been proven to be successful. You want to pick more than just a random project out of the curriculum. You want to see what learning objectives the teacher is trying to achieve, and then the two of you select a project that best matches the learning goals.

-jeremy

Apple Learning Coach

For the past month or so I have been working on becoming an Apple Learning Coach. Being an instructional or technical coach in the education community has been something that I have want to do for a long time. Since I was in high school I have been fascinated with computer and technology. I love to learn about technology and share my passion with others, but I have never really found my niche in the professional technical world.

That was until I came into teaching. I saw how I could use the technology that I love to help engage and educate my kids. Since my first student teaching lesson in math with an iPad and AppleTV I have been hooked trying to figure out how to further intergrate technology into my lessons thoughtfully. That word, thoughtfully, is an important one in that sentence. It is easy to just add technology to whatever you are teaching, but you should be asking yourself does adding this technology enhance what I am teaching? Or challenge my kids to look at a problem creatively? If the answer is no, then you should pause and rethink the approach to the lesson.

Going to the Apple Learning Coach program I honestly thought is would be all about technology first and everything else second, but I was surprised to see that first was building a relationship with your peers and gaining trust before you even begin to do something with technology. I appreciate the approach and it endears me to the company and their philosophy even more.

-jeremy

iPads in the Classroom

I just received my iPads and cases from a funded donors choose project I had setup. It is a really amazing way to request resources for your classroom when there is no other viable option.

I am trying to setup my classroom with flexible seating and ready to learn 21st century skills. To truly make it work you need technology that can be just as flexible. We have Chromebooks and while flexible, they are not flexible enough. That’s where the iPad comes in.

With these new iPads and cases from donors choose, more of my students and now able to work on collaborative projects wherever they want in the classroom. Anytime you come into my room you will find students laying on the floor, sitting on stools, using balance balls, or just standing and working on an iPad. It looks more like a busy and bustling office than a classroom.

I have given up my desk so we have more room to spread out and learn in our individual styles. I am able to run my classroom completely through my iPad that I carry everywhere.

Apps like keynote and it’s keynote live feature allow me to share a whiteboard to every student in the class so they all have a front row seat when we are doing whole group “campfire” lessons.

During small group “ water hole” lessons I like to use explain everything so my students can show me and each other what they know. It’s amazing to watch them show and share their knowledge with their peers.

One of my favorite ways for my students to reflect on what we have learned during our “cave” learning time is with flipgrid. I will setup a new grid while the students work individually and as they finish they can share their thought and feelings with me.

Overall, I think that the iPads are going to be a great  addition to our class!