Monday, May 20, 2019

Save the Dates! Upcoming Annual Minnetonka Site Visits Oct. 24, 2019 & April 9, 2020


For the past 15 years, thousands of educators have visited Minnetonka Public Schools, including the National School Boards Association which held two visits to Minnetonka. Come see learning in action, witness proven programs and gather innovative ideas which you can take back to your school! This year's visits are on Thursday, October 24, 2019 and Thursday, April 9, 2020. Register Today!

Historically, our tours focused on how Minnetonka uses technology as an accelerator of learning. Back in 2003, visitors came to see SMARTBoards and sound fields and a learning management system implemented in K-12. In 2011 visitors came to see iPads used in learning in a 1:1 environment. With the advent of our Teaching and Learning Instructional Framework the 2016 tour focus shifted from technology to the eight dimensions of the Framework and how they are embedded in our programming, our instructional platform, and our culture.

Visitors can choose to start your visit at an elementary school, middle school or our high school. Specialty programs include Navigators and high potential programs, VANTAGE, Minnetonka Research, Chinese and Spanish language immersion, Tonka Online, athletics and the arts. After your tours at a school, you will transition to our District Service Center for lunch and breakout sessions of your choice. Choose from a wide variety of sessions led by Minnetonka staff to learn how things work behind the scenes. Sessions include innovation, the Teaching and Learning Instructional Framework, coding, Design for Learning, assessment, the curriculum review process, gifted and talented programming, student support services, personalized learning, 1:1 iPads and more. Discover best practices for implementing meaningful instruction that will accelerate learning, have time to ask questions and head back to your own school full of ideas! Additional details about possible sessions to choose from can be found here. Availability is limited in order to keep sessions small. Lunch is provided. Complete your registration by October 5, 2019 to take advantage of our Early Bird pricing. Lunch is provided. Register Today! 
Learn more about Minnetonka Schools and Technology Integration:
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Monday, May 13, 2019

Elementary Students Focus on a Healthy Balance of Screen Time


It seems like just about every day there are headlines about our use of media and a growing awareness of the need to find a balance. Digital Health and Wellness is moving to the forefront, and it’s great to see that organizations like Common Sense Media are adjusting their digital citizenship curriculum to reflect these changes and new understandings. In each of our elementary schools, media specialists teach students about digital citizenship and use resources from Common Sense Media.

This past year, Common Sense Media revised their grade 3-8 curriculum and it now includes Media Balance & Well-Being. These lessons are designed to have kids reflect on their own media use. Students are encouraged to monitor their emotions when using media and work to figure out what balanced use means. The lessons help students understand the importance of analyzing the quality of the content on their screens and the role it plays in their lives and relationships. (Related: The Difference Between Educational and Entertainment Screen Time)
Recently Scenic Heights Media Specialist Melinda Barry used Common Sense Media's curriculum with her fifth grade students. She also used PearDeck, an interactive tool that allows all students to participate in the lesson, contribute to the learning, and answer questions to share with the instructor and class during the lesson. Students reflected on what makes a healthy media choice. They thought about the media they consume/create, how long, where, and how it fits in to their overall life balance. Students then develop a plan for their media use, such as the one pictured.

Melinda also brought in the use of Apple’s Screen Time tools built into iOS12 and had the students turn on this monitoring tool on their own iPad. She shared her personal Screen Time analytics report to discuss with students, too. At the end of the lesson, students were asked to describe what they would tell a classmate who was absent that day. This closing activity works as a way for the teacher to check the students' understanding of the lesson. As you can see from some of the students’ responses pictured below, they learned a lot!




Elementary school is a great time to start these conversations and equip students with the skills of self awareness and regulation of their media use. Hopefully as they get older they will be more aware of media’s role in their lives. They should also become better users of tools like social media, smart phones, and the internet for personal, educational and entertainment purposes.

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Monday, May 6, 2019

Preventing Human Downgrading: A Race to the Top for Wellbeing


In the past I've written about Tristan Harris and his efforts to help guide technology to make us better, improving our lives and relationships versus technology that addicts us. (See One to Watch: The Center for Humane Technology as well as Your Phone is a Purposely Designed Slot Machine Designed to Be Addictive) Two weeks Tristan and the Center for Humane Technology held an event and announced "A New Agenda for Tech," challenging Silicon Valley leaders to "reverse human downgrading by inspiring a new race to the top and realigning technology with humanity."
 
The talk is a must watch--please make 45 minutes to do so. (If that seems long, consider that the average person spends 60+ minutes/day on YouTube--and watching this talk will make you aware of an eye-opening unintentional result of YouTube's artificial intelligence recommendation engine which affects us all and is changing world wide culture.) It's important for educators, parents, kids, politicians, technology leaders, and everyone to understand what has and is happening, and act upon it. The following email I received last week summarizing the event does a great job of concisely summarizing the content of the talk better than I can:
Introducing “Human Downgrading”
Our primary goal was to move public discourse in Silicon Valley from a cacophony of disconnected grievances and scandals ("they took our data!") to a meaningful humane agenda of actions that address the vast surface area of problems arising from technology’s race for attention. 
In last week’s presentation, we explained how seemingly separate problems – tech addiction, teen depression, shortening attention spans, political polarization, the breakdown of truth, outrage-ification of culture, and the rise of vanity/micro-celebrity culture – are actually not separate issues. They are all symptoms of one underlying problem: the race between tech giants to capture human attention, which becomes a race to overwhelm human weaknesses. Put together, that race creates “human downgrading.” 
Giving a name to the connected system of human downgrading is crucial, because without it, solution creators end up working in silos and attempt to solve the problem by playing an infinite “whack-a-mole” game. It’s like working on coral reefs, ocean acidification, or hurricanes before there was a recognition of systemic climate change. Shared language creates the opportunity and leverage to develop systemic solutions and unite the voices of concerned technologists, investors, researchers, media, policymakers, and parents. 
Human downgrading is a problem that reduces our capacity to solve all other problems. It suppresses critical thinking and nuance, makes us more lonely, and reduces our capacity to find common ground and shared values. 
The Solution?
While the problem is immense, the good news is that the solution involves one thing: better protecting the vulnerabilities of human nature. Technologists must approach innovation and design with an awareness of protecting of the ways we’re manipulatable as human beings. Instead of more artificial intelligence or more advanced tech, we actually just need more sophistication about what protects and heals human nature and social systems. To that end, we are developing a new model that technologists can use to explore and assess how technology affects us at the individual, relational, and societal levels. 
What’s Next?
This is the beginning of a long journey. Instead of a race to the bottom of “how can we most effectively manipulate you,” we must create a new a race to the top to completely reverse human downgrading. To start facilitating this transition, we are announcing four initiatives: 
Opportunities for key stakeholders to plug into working groups to take action.
“Your Undivided Attention” — a new podcast launching in June where Tristan and Aza gather insights about the invisible limits and ergonomics of human nature from a wide range of experts to address human downgrading. 
Design guides to facilitate assessment across human sensitivities and social spaces to help guide designers in redesigning their products. 
A Humane Technology conference in the next year to bring together people working on many different aspects of Human Downgrading. 
I'm thankful that Tristan and his colleagues are pushing for this. We have already seen some of the fruits of their labor. As mentioned during the video, Apple's Screen Time and Google's Digital Wellbeing tools to help users take control of their own technology and be more mindful of its use are now in place on over a billion phones. That's promising change happening already. I look forward to more to come. A while back I joined their online community forums and encourage you to do the same. Keep talking about these topics with those around you--with family, friends, and colleagues. Read more in related posts, too:
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Monday, April 29, 2019

Using Technology to Think Critically About History & Engage Students' Creativity

Teachers are passionate about the subjects they teach. Sometimes however, students are less so--they might not share their instructor’s enthusiasm and/or find the topic inherently exciting or motivating. Middle school social studies teacher Jim Malewig at Minnetonka Middle School West is familiar with this scenario. One of the topics he teaches seventh graders about is the Reconstruction post Civil War, and over the years Jim has come up with some creative ways to make it more engaging and memorable for his students. 

Recently I was in his classroom during this unit of study and was amazed to see the students’ engagement on their “Road to Reconstruction” projects. Students were working to answer the question, “To what extent did Reconstruction bring African Americans closer to full citizenship?” A few years ago Jim began having students make a timeline of the events during this period and used a road map as an analogy. Then after working with Lisa Reed, Tonka Coders and Makers Teacher on Special Assignment, they decided to integrate Ozobots with the project. Ozobots are programmable robots that read special colored markers to gather their instructions. Depending on what colors and patterns are used to create the code, Ozobots can be programmed to turn, change direction, color, speed and more. 

Now as part of their learning, students identify the key events of the time period, create a roadmap/timeline of ten major events during the Reconstruction, decide what actions the Ozobot will take while traveling this path to symbolize the each event, and then film an Ozobot on their timeline. But the project doesn’t stop there. Students import their video into iMovie and add in historical photos to illustrate each of their selected events. Then they write a script and record their narration into their film. 

Throughout the project students are very motivated. This project is a great example of learning at higher levels on the Minnetonka Framework for Teaching and Learning. Students are communicating and collaborating in small groups, critically thinking and analyzing events and their effect on history. They are able to use their creativity and technology to illustrate their learning. Perhaps without realizing it, they are coding their Ozobots and debugging issues to get things to work, too. Rather than just reading about this in a textbook and taking notes, students are deeply learning and understanding the material and historical time period. Perhaps some of them will become future social studies teachers, too, motivating their students in unique and creative ways!

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