Category: Education

MSUrbanSTEM Wipro Fellowship

~ Kyle Shack ~ Leave a comment

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For the past few weeks I have had the honor of working as a member of the MSU-Wipro Urban STEM Fellowship’s instructional team, with twenty-five of the most dedicated, inspiring and motivated educators in Chicago’s Public Schools. These past two weeks were the initial face to face portion of a year long fellowship that focuses on helping STEM educators create transformative, innovative and multimodal learning environments for their students.

Throughout the two weeks, I had the privilege of watching fellows dive into content, pedagogy, technology and social justice as they collaboratively worked towards revolutionizing the way young learners in Chicago experience the STEM subjects.

I will do my best to share the amazing ideas and creations developed by the fellows. There have already been too many to explain in one post. Please visit the web portfolios for each fellow, as they will be showcasing their work by publishing on their personal sites. After spending the past two weeks around these amazing fellows, I am thrilled for all of the Chicago students whose STEM related experiences will be profoundly different this school year.

APS Ed Camp

~ Kyle Shack ~ Leave a comment

To say that today was amazing, inspiring or even perfect wouldn’t be enough to explain what transpired in Allegan. Today, Allegan High School hosted the first ever APS EdCamp, providing a day of tech, collaboration and learning for members of the local educational community.

As a facilitator, I had the opportunity to see the incredible effort and time put into this event. Members of the APS Tech Community have been building towards a district wide technology roll out this coming fall, where both iPads and Netbooks will be making their large scale debuts in Allegan classrooms.

For those unfamiliar with the EdCamp model, you can read more about it here. Also known as an “unconference”, the EdCamp provides a casual and informal setting for colleagues to experiment, share, learn and collaborate about all topics education. While maintaing a heavy technology presence, EdCamp’s main goal is to provide a space for educators to grow and build on their profession.

I was so proud to see the members of my district, many having just been given their devices this morning, dive into learning and the EdCamp format. Everywhere you looked, you could see APS educators collaborating to solve any questions that arose, regardless of their tech experience. New users dove into twitter, and joined in the backchannel, as others earned their first credly badges, all within minutes of unpacking their new tech toys. As the day progressed, the sessions became lively hubs of conversation about LMS’s, Google Drive, blogs, apps and many more. It truly was an amazing day. Please take a look below at the Storify of today’s twitter backchannel, #APSEdCamp.

[View the story “APS Ed Camp ” on Storify]