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Empowered Learners

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Betsy DeVos

Secretary of Education

U.S. Department of Education

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2018 Finalists

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Student Voices

Moderator: Christine Fox, Deputy Executive Director, SETDA

Students: Nicolas Boozan, Molly Clark, Marie DeSorgher, Gabriela Jordan, Charlie Levine, Chloe Weinstein
Grace Borst, Innovation Specialist, St. Albans City School, Vermont
Ashley Levine, Teacher, St. Albans City School, Vermont
Joan Cavallo, Principal, St. Albans City School, Vermont
Peter Drescher, State Director of Education Technology, Vermont Agency of Education

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SETDA - 2018

Student Voices Award

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Welcome!

Chloe

Charlie

Gabriela

Nick

Marie

Molly

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Technology is part of our Culture

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One to One Learning

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Let’s Go Deeper into Stewardship

Stewardship

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Stewardship is something we all do…

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We are in our 8th year.

We have 25 acres of land.

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UVM Drone Project

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After that we bought a drone...

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Signage and QR Codes

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Stewardship Day Presentations

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Our Weather Station

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Everything wasn’t total tech

Chloe:

We often used a combination of high tech tools mixed with low tech or no tech tools to create a functional and educational wetlands.

When we built the bridges our team started off by drawing what they would like to see for a bridge.

Then we used Google to see some bridge options.

We made a small model of the bridge and then planned out the materials needed for the larger bridges.

Power tools were used during construction, but no use of newer technology was really used for that project.

We also wanted people to know what types of plants were in our wetlands.

We went through and identified many of the plants using an app on our teachers phones and we created labelled signs for them with clay.

Unfortunately, our signs were damaged.

We plan on going back out, re-identifying the plants again and making signs with our laser cutter out of wood from the wetlands.

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This Land Video

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Our Pollinator Garden and Bees

Marie:

In the video you saw the Pollinator gardens.

This is the Traveler Team’s Stewardship Project.

Nick and I were both Travelers when we were in first to third grade.

We had a lot of work to do to get our Pollinator Gardens ready.

We had to do a lot of weeding and planting.

We also had to do a lot of problem solving because our garden’s are located in our school’s parking lot and they kept getting trampled.

We ended up putting in wooden barriers down the middle to keep people of walking across our plants.

The pollinator garden wasn’t our only project, we also had pet bees!

I was a part of an afterschool club called None of your Beeswax.

During this club we learned more about our Bees and how we can keep them healthy.

One time one of my teachers asked me where I was going after school and I told them, None of their Beeswax, they were really offended until I told them it was the name of the club!

Unfortunately, our beehive didn’t survive, there was a lot of construction happening at the time and our bees never returned to the hive.

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Laser Cutter and Robots

Marie:

We used several different types of technology throughout our two stewardship projects.

Students on our team design a logo for the Pollinator garden that was hand drawn.

They learned how to use the laser cutter in our Makerspace to create a professional all-weather sign made from an old chalkboard.

Even after a couple of years, it is still in the garden!

We also used technology to learn more about bees and how they beehive.

Bees communicate to each other by doing a dance called a Waggle Dance.

I’d like to pass it over to Nick to talk about our Bee dance and Programming.

Nick: When I was in first grade

(This is the picture of me in first grade),

we started to learn how to program robots.

The first robot we learned was a BeeBot.

This is a BeeBot.

Beebot is programmed using buttons on the top.

These are the buttons.

We programmed the BeeBots to do a dance by having it move in different directions.

While the Beebots were doing their dance, we all danced along and did our own dance.

I have learned how to program other robots like Dash

The middle picture is me in second grade holding Dash.

I also have learned how to use Scratch Jr. and code.org.

Programming has taught me a lot, especially patience, because a robot doesn’t always do what you want, and persistence, because I don’t give up!

Marie:

Technology has been a really big part in so many of our stewardship projects, it has allowed us to do things that would have never been possible without it!

Molly is going to come up and tell you all about out School Wide Economics unit and how technology influenced it.

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The Economics Unit

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Incredibles Calming Tools

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Highlighting Design Thinking: Boredom Block

Molly

Today, we’re going to take a closer look at our boredom block

*Take boredom block out of the packaging and explain about the packaging and what the boredom block is used for**

-We started out by tracing a figure 8 onto a piece of wood then using a wood burning tool to make the figure 8 permanent. It was taking a really long time, it was hard to follow exactly on the lines and to make sure we burned deep enough into the wood. Our goal was to make 100 of these and it didn’t seem realistic to do them all the way we were doing them in the short amount of time that we had.

-We looked to see how we could use the Makerspace to help. We have a laser cutter that can etch into different objects. To get the design ready we had to do a lot of measuring to get the correct size, we had to create the design on the computer and then burned into one block with the laser cutter. You can see this on the picture right up here.

-Once the prototype was done, we compared it to the wood burning and our team decided to go with the laser cutting method.

-We thought this was going to be faster, which it was, but it still took 8 minutes per block to run in the laser cutter. We made 100 boredom blocks, that was just for the figure 8. Not including all of the finishing we needed to make the block look nice.

-Designing our figure 8 on the computer and using the laser cutter to create the indent gave us a consistent and quality product that the wood burning would never have given us. Our boredom blocks sold out really quickly, before everyone could get one. Now, that we have the design already created on the computer we could make more if we really wanted to.

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Scentsational Soaps

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Design Thinking: Commercials & Green Screen

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Design Thinking: Commercials & Green Screen

Who was your audience?

How did you organize your ideas?

Example from Scentsational Soap

What do we want people to know?

Did you have to do a lot of takes to get it right?

Molly: Gabriela, what part of this business did you help out with the most?

Gabriela: The advertising!

Molly: What did you do for advertising for your business?

Gabriela: We made a commercial using our video cameras and green screen!

Molly: So Gabriela, when you were making the commercial who were you making it for?

Gabriela: The people who would buy our soap, our friends, family, and other students.

Molly: What did you want people to know or do after watching your commercial?

Gabriela: We made the products ourselves, they had local ingredients, and we wanted people to go to our school to buy our soap, hopefully by the bucketload.

Molly: How did you come up with the ideas for the video?

Gabriela: We created a storyboard with pictures to organize our ideas, and everyone got to help with a scene.

Molly: What idea did you help with?

Gabriela: We wanted to make it amusing, so when our friends hands get cleaned I wanted angels singing. I thought we were going to pay someone rich and famous to do it instead of us. But, we ended up having to do it ourselves.

Molly: Did you have to do a lot of takes to get your singing just right?

Gabriela: Yes, there was too much background noise on the first few takes, we had to kick out the kids helping us because they were too loud.

Molly: Gabriela, did you also get to act in the video?

Gabriela: Yes! I was very excited to be a bar of soap. We had to create our soap props, and then we got to stand in front of a green screen in the classroom so it looked like we were in a bathroom.

Molly: How did you know that the commercial was ready?

Gabriela: We tested it by showing it to our teachers and my classmates to see what they thought, and they all loved it!

Molly: What was your favorite part of helping with the video?

Gabriela: Dressing up as a bar of soap and walking back and forth in front of the camera.

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Two Real Businesses Emerged

Cool Mugs

Cutting Edge Designs

Molly

Our Economics unit helped us realize how powerful it is to have a business at school.

From this unit two businesses emerged;

Cutting Edge Designs works collectively on projects that will be sold online.

These products are usually made of wood and customized on the laser cutter.

The students run all aspects of the business.

All the profits are put back into the business. It will open in time for Christmas this year.

Cool Mugs has interns that have already delivered nearly 90 Cool Mugs.

This year they expect to add a new design in time for Christmas.

They are also customizing stickers for people who own their own mug.

They expect to have an online webpage this year as well.

This business came from our Stewardship Committee that noticed lots of trash from coffee and other beverages in our trash.

Now we would like to do a door prize made by our students for this event. You each have raffle tickets at your place - we are going to pull 5 Cool Mug Tickets and a cutting board.

I’d like to introduce Charlie who will talk about e-portfolios

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https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Hi7FNnvktsU

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2nd Grade Goal

My goal will be to not rush through my work. I will work slowly so that I can work neater.

5th Grade Goals:

Personal Goal: My personal goal this year is to become more active. I want to do this because I want to become a good soccer player when I grow up. I need to get more active to be a better soccer player because you need to have good stamina to run up and down the field. My plan to meet this goal is to run up the street and back after school everyday.

Academic Goal: My academic goal for this school year is get fours on my SBAC test. .I will meet this goal by listening during class and doing my best on the SBAC. This my academic goal because I want to do the best I possibly can on the test also because my parents give $50 for each four I get on the SBAC .

E-portfolios

Our Personal Learning Plan

Charlie -

At this point, I’d like to highlight a few parts of my E-portfolio, including goals, transferable skills and reflections through the years.

These are my goals from 2nd grade and 5th grade. In second grade, I only had to set 1 goal. In 5th grade, I have to have a personal goal and an academic goal.

Whenever I think of my goals, I like to also think about why that goal is important to me.

I always like to make a plan as a reminder to keep working on my goals. So, I like to write my plan right in my e-portfolio so I can stay on track to meet all of my goals!

I really like that we type our goals into our e-portfolios because I am the kind of kid that forgets where I put things as soon as I let go of them. When I put anything in my e-portfolio, I can see it and work on it on any computer. I definitely couldn’t do that if it was on a piece of paper.

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Transferable Skills: Self Direction

I chose this math sheet for self direction because I worked hard on my combinations to 10.

2nd Grade

In math we are learning about fractions we made fraction strips to help us with fractions. We also took some tests with fractions it is called the big two it helps us get ready for the sbac

3rd Grade

Fall and Spring Evidence done in google docs and embedded

This spring we had to do a nonfiction book project. For my book I chose Inside of a Dog written by Alexandra Horowitz. I chose to put this in self direction because I presented it by myself. I think my book project went pretty well but I definitely could have been better by me looking at my class more. This is what I think about my book project and the book I chose.

4th Grade

Charlie

I have to prove that I’ve met all five of the transferable skills (Clear and Effective Communication, Self Direction, Responsible Citizenship, Creative and Practical Problem Solving and Integrative Thinking) by reflecting and providing evidence for all of the years I’ve been here at St. Albans City School.

I picked self-direction to highlight for you today.

As I was preparing for this presentation, I had the chance to go back and look through my eportfolio. It was very interesting to see the difference and growth in the amount I wrote and the quality of my reflections from 2nd grade to 4th grade.

When I was looking back at my 4th grade reflection and project, I realized that I didn’t even reflect about how self-directed I was when I chose to learn and use the 3D printer. I wanted to make a 3D printed dog, like the character in my book project. I was the only student in my class that used the 3D printer. If I didn’t have my own computer and access to the 3D printer at my school this wouldn’t have even been possible.

After I’m done with this presentation, I’m going to be putting the video of me presenting at this conference as evidence on my clear and effective communication page.

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Self-Reflection

Unified Arts Reflection

Teacher Reflection

Parent Reflection

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Collaboration Characterizes our PLPs

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At St. Albans City School

Technology is everywhere...

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SETDA - 2018

Thank You

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Edcamp Style Leadership Discussions

Sign-Ups: https://tinyurl.com/Summitedcamp2018