The Stages of Personalized Learning Environments (PLE) Version One chart needed to be updated. Why? Because of the considerable feedback we received after posting our first version of the chart. Some of the feedback was about consistency and flow across the stages. What worked in what stage?
We definitely want to thank those that critiqued the stages for us and helped us with this version two. Some districts shared with us that our version one was going to be their foundation of their personalized learning initiative. We wanted to refine it so it was clear, consistent, and easily understood. We went to work to update the stages for them and anyone else moving to a personalized learning environment.
Please feel free to download version two and let us know how it supports your transformation to personalizing learning. Via Kathleen McClaskey According to writer and digital revolution expert Don Tapscott, the classic university lecture model is an outdated way of teaching a generation that has grown up making, changing and learning from digital communities. Via Susan Bainbridge One of the constant challenges facing educators is to find coherence in the work we are doing. We need to understand how our efforts relate to and support each other in pursuit of student learning.
Jim Rickabaugh is the Director of Institute @ CESA #1 in Wisconsin. "The relationship between efforts to implement Response to Intervention (RtI) systems and our work to personalize learning offers a good example of this dilemma."
Rickabaugh explains ahow a split screen approach to leadership applies here. "The framework of a personalized learning approach enables educators to position intervention to occur as soon as the learner needs it. As a result, success is designed in from the beginning and learners are less likely to experience the loss of confidence that too often accompanies repeated failure to learn in the current system." CompetencyWorks is a new website highlighting innovations, promising practices and solutions for tough issues that educators, administrators and policymakers face when shifting from a time-based system towards competency-based education, launched today at http://competencyworks.org.
CompetencyWorks' five-part, working definition of high quality competency education: 1. Students advance upon mastery.
This site will provide models and research about competency-based approaches and help us with our research on personalizing learning. 
Gillian Locke, a senior at Kettle Moraine School Districts’ KM Global Charter School is a guest blogger this week @ CESA#1. Gillian is in a personalized learning environment at KM Global and spoke eloquently about her experiences when she was one of the panelists at CESA#1 Youth Summit in March. Here are some of her thoughts about personalized learning:
"Unlike most seniors in high school, I have the freedom to choose what I want to do when I wake up each morning. I am not limited to an 8 hour bell schedule like my peers, nor does my learning stop when I drive off the high school parking lot at 2:30 pm. I don’t have to just do homework in the evenings, and don’t even have to go to classes during the day. Being a part of Kettle Moraine’s new charter school KM Global allows me to direct my learning on my own.
Because I have so many options, and different formats for learning, I have become a lot more in tune with how I learn best."
Read the full blog and be inspired! Via Kathleen McClaskey 
"Susan Yonezawa, Larry McClure, and Makeba Jones evaluate formal attempts to personalize U.S. secondary education and assess the research on teacher-student relationships and their impact. With a focus on programs for low-income and minority youth, the authors examine school reforms that have incorporated personalization. To improve student achievement and emotional well-being significantly, they conclude, increasing personalization must be the goal of a widespread, sustained organizational effort." Via Kathleen McClaskey, Jim Lerman EdX is a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world. EdX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone.
Online education is disruptive. Take classes with anyone from around the world. Everyone working on learning together. Yes - let's make learning personal. 
Competency-based learning is based on demonstrating mastery instead of time based on the Carnegie unit. This approach is based on Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DOK) created by Norman Webb. Webb identified 4 levels of assessment: 1. Recall 2. Skill or Concept 3. Strategic Thinking 4. Extended Thinking
DOK levels are a ceiling, not a target. Check out a comparison of Webb's DOK vs Bloom's Taxonomy. 
An example of a professional development day where the staff at a school in British Columbia was engaged in "Sharing Our Learning Day." The topics discussed by different teams included: >Student Engagement Team >Literacy Team >Technology Team (Web Site Creation) >Technology Team >Personalized Learning Team >Problem Based Learning >AFL Team (Assessment OF Learning)
The process of Building Experts confirmed that the right conditions (time, focused energy, autonomy, purpose and trusting relationships) can cause shift in learning that are enduring, sustainable and relevant to the needs of the school.
Stories are powerful. We put together this little demonstration to inspire our people make more emotional connections.
I love his short video about why stories work so well to make information meaningful and memorable!
I share it with you today for 2 reasons: It looks like it would be a very simple video technique you could use for sharing your own business stories. If you need to demonstrate the power of storytelling in your work, share this video!
Hope this video gets your week off to a roaring start. Via Karen Dietz, Richard Andrews, jdprickett, Elena Elliniadou, Heiko Idensen A Prezi describing what competency-based education is. The steps are clear. Read through this to understand and then set up a competency-based system so students take ownership of their learning. 
But what will it mean for learning as colleges, too, increasingly mine data to shape the student experience? What does educational personalization look like? How finely should technologists try to parse it—down to individual ... Via Grant Montgomery 
What an excellent introduction on how to Clear the Path with UDL. Kit Hard presents practical and effective UDL strategies that can engage learners and remove barriers to learning . He also introduces a number of easy to use Web 2.0 tools and apps that can help all learners express what they know.
"Universal Design for Learning (UDL) provides a lens that educators can use to make content accessible for all students. See how Kit Hard from the St. Clair County RESA uses technology to clear the path for all learners."
Thank you Kit Hard for a great video on UDL! Via Kathleen McClaskey |
Is UDL included in the Common Core?
"UDL is included in the section of the Common Core Standards called “application to students with disabilities”. In this section the authors referred to the definition laid out in the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (PL 110-135). The reference to UDL in this section may give the impression that UDL is just for students with disabilities. However, UDL not only applies to students with disabilities, it applies to all other learners as well. All students can benefit from the types of instruction used to reach learners “on the margins,” as the learning needs of all individuals vary a great deal. As such, UDL should be used within inclusive general education classrooms."
What Aligns with UDL?
"There are many ways in which the Common Core Standards align to the UDL framework. Curricula (goals, methods, materials, and assessments) designed using UDL put an emphasis on creating effective, flexible goals, and the Common Core Standards provide an important framework for thinking about what goals will be most effective."
Via Kathleen McClaskey 
Schools should use technology to rethink education, not simply speed up what they do now, Justin Reich says.
Reich shares a middle school he visited where they used a creative-agency metaphor where learning technologies that enable students to collaborate with peers, pursue their interests, publish their work to the world and take greater responsibility for their own learning. I'd like to know which middle school he visited so I can write about it.
He did bring in how Khan Academy that I believe allows students to learn at their own pace. But he did mention that students site at a terminal that delivers lessons at an appropriately challenging pace. I have some concerns about putting students in front of a terminal instead of using class time to do projects, collaborate, discuss, and interact with their peers. The power of technology is more than using it to build testing abilities. I want to know more before making any more comments.
How do students make sense of their creative processes?
Design thinking at the K12 Laboratory at Stanford. Everything feels like a field trip. Learning rather than teaching. Each kid is different and special. Teachers are learners, too. Will want to learn more and maybe visit. 
Personalizing learning for all learners means understanding the different stages of personalized learning environments (PLE). Stage One is teacher-centered with learner voice and choice. Stage Two is when teachers co-design learning with the learners. Stage Three is when learners design and drive their own learning. Via Kathleen McClaskey 
Online edX courses will open both universities’ classrooms to the world while enhancing on-campus learning.
MIT President Susan Hockfield and Harvard University President Drew Faust, accompanied by top officials from both institutions, announced on Wednesday a new collaboration that will unite the Cambridge-based universities in an ambitious new partnership to deliver online education to learners anywhere in the world.
The new venture, called edX, will provide interactive classes from both Harvard and MIT — for free — to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. But a key goal of the project, Faust said, is “to enhance the educational experience of students who study in our classrooms and laboratories.”
I'm going to check this out. 
By Laura Devaney
"Mobile devices are now found in the hands of most children, and school leaders are using that to their advantage by incorporating devices that students already own into classroom lessons and projects.
"Research-based benefits of one-to-one mobile learning initiatives might include: Improvements in attendance and discipline Broader array of learning resources and experiences Increased frequency and quality of supportive individual and group interactions Improvements in student and parent attitudes toward the school Increases in student achievement." Via Jim Lerman 
Blogger Judy Willis MD was a neurologist before she became a teacher; she shares some insights about how the brain responds to video games. Via JackieGerstein Ed.D. 
Silvia Tolisano shares her ten most used apps to become fluent on the iPad. I like her explanation of fluency: fluency does not necessarily come natural to most people. Becoming fluent on the iPad requires a conscious effort and time as well.
She provided a great analysis of her use of the iPad: view the iPad, not as a replacement for my laptop, but as a:
Highly mobile device
Personalized device
Customizable device
Consolidation device
Productivity device
Reading device
Annotating device
Recommend reading the rest of her blog post to see her list of 10 best apps. I'm just starting to get fluent. My list is similar but have a few others so need to write my own post. Thanks Silvia. Watch this clip to get a sense of how Big Picture Learning personalizes each students' education.
"Big Picture Learning’s mission is to lead vital changes in education, both in the United States and internationally, by generating and sustaining innovative, personalized schools that work in tandem with the real world of the greater community." Via Kathleen McClaskey Eric Mazur, a Harvard University professor, says learning interests him far more than teaching, and he encourages a shift from teaching to helping students learn.
After seven years of teaching Physics, Mazur realized his students could answer the questions on the test but didn’t grasp the concepts. After administering a test on force, a warning flag went up when one student raised her hand and asked, “How should I answer these questions—according to what you taught me, or how I usually think about these things?” After some soul searching about his teaching techniques, he realized “The students did well on textbook-style problems,” he explains. “They had a bag of tricks, formulas to apply. But that was solving problems by rote. They floundered on the simple word problems, which demanded a real understanding of the concepts behind the formulas.”
He decided to turn everything around and ask his students to discuss the consept with each other. The first time he tried this, it was utter chaos — but it worked. This innovative style of learning grew into “peer instruction” or “interactive learning,” a pedagogical method that has spread far beyond physics and taken root on campuses nationally.
Think about interactive pedagogy for all ages and all and any learner. Ask them to think about it -- then discuss it. 
Kathleen McClaskey interviewed Stephen Petrucci because he is the first British Columbia administrator discussing UDL in relation to a personalized learning environment. Stephen is Director of Instruction in School District 60 - Fort St. John, BC. Along with background information about his district, he shares the shift from the 3 Rs (reading, writing, arithmetic) to the 7 Cs:
Brian Kuhn has shared his experiences at an elementary school where Universal Designfor Learning is being implemented. Included are videos on how students are using the tools to write a speech. The principal of the school shared her thoughts and how UDL makes a difference:
> “increase ‘access’ to general curriculum materials and, at the same time, provide support for the learner’s particular challenges” > “‘text-to-speech’ technology can be a powerful tool for visually and processing speed impaired students to keep pace and comprehend what they are reading” > “technology is used to ‘even the playing field’ and allow the child independent access to the curriculum”
Via Kathleen McClaskey |
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