Westside School District DevelopU Reflection

June 11 and 12 were two days of an incredible experience.  I was blessed to be invited to Westside School District in Omaha, Nebraska.  The Westside School District is doing it right!  At the start of the 2014-2015 school year, all Kindergarten through fifth grade students will have a school issued iPad.  All sixth through twelfth grade students will be issued MacBooks.

Issuing devices is one thing, providing impactful professional development for the teachers and administrators is another!  Westside provided their already incredible teachers with the opportunity to learn so many different effective technology integration strategies from Apple Distinguished Educators.  All of the ADEs are classroom teachers who have effectively demonstrated technology integration which provides valuable learning lessons that involve critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and citizenship.

All of the ADEs are experts in their own fields.  I feel blessed to be able to present with...
Kelly Croy, Bill Ziegler, Matt Baier, Cristin Rold, Matt Lee, Julia Garcia, Gabby Meyers, Katie Morrow, Kevin Morrow, and Josh Mika

All of their presentations can be found on the Westside DevelopU Wiki.

I was asked to present four different topics.

App Smashing: Advanced Workflow on the iPad
About 100 people attended this.  Their energy and enthusiasm was outstanding!
I truly wanted to show how using a simple iPad app is an effective method, but utilizing two, three, and even four apps provides critical thinking and creativity opportunities for students that moves them to a higher level of thinking.


Creating Content with the iPad: What Can I Use For...
About 50 teachers attended this session held in the beautiful Courtyard in the Westside High School.  In my teaching support role, I am asked numerous times in a day, "If I want to edit an image on the iPad, what would be the best app?"  Not only this task gets asked about, but close to twenty different requests are asked.  With that, I created an infographic to help teachers, BUT more importantly students decide what what's the best tool to accomplish a task.



The second day brought me to teaching two different sessions.

Visualizing Learning: Show What You Know Using An iPad
About 30 people attended this.  Mostly elementary teachers who wanted to complete screencasting on the iPad.  Screenchomp, Educreations, and Explain Everything were featured.  I believe that the best part of the presentation was showing MANY real videos of students creating assessments using these tools.  Positive feedback was also provided on the portion of the presentation that included a tutorial for Explain Everything!



My last session of the day was AWESOME!  140 staff and administrators joined in learning about...

Innovative, Personalized Learning Environments
I really tried to show teachers who have removed their traditional rows and desks and created students centered, learning environments.  This doesn't mean that direct instruction areas are eliminated!  We just think about them differently!


An enormous thank you to Paul Lindgren, Matt Lee, Cristin Rold, all of the administration, and the entire teaching staff of the district for making my first trip to Westside one of the most enjoyable learning and presenting experiences I have had!  The DevelopU learning experience and the Wiki are all very well done!  I would also like to thank all of the wonderful people associated with Apple (I will not list them all as I, unfortunately, will probably forget one) as they always make ADEs feel like rock stars!  It is NOT taken for granted and does NOT go unnoticed!

High School Creative Learning Environment

Mr. Rodal decided that over Christmas break he was going to remove 19 desks.  Not all the desks, just some of them.  Group, collaborative work happens every day in his classroom.  The desks were taking up a great deal of space and required constant arranging and rearranging.

He fixed this.

He removed 19 desks from his classroom.

We are documenting his classroom experiences with candid responses from both students and teachers.  Let's hear from the teacher, first!

Video Link


Impact On Students:
Creativity:  Students are able to create their own learning spaces.  They are not confined to a desk.  They must also decide how to utilize the large white boards that are now in the room.
Collaboration: Removing INDIVIDUAL desks has eliminated INDIVIDUAL borders.  Gathering in learning groups is efficient.

More to follow...

iDevices, Google Drive, and Over App To Document Successes

Mr. Fullerton, our middle school principal, and Mr. Krause, our middle school assistant principle, created an opportunity for staff to use two and one half hours of a professional development day to allow staff to create their own learning environment.  Staff were able to choose their own area to think, question, collaborate, and create.  Some staff chose our own school forest and made bacon over an open fire, some chose a local coffee shop, while others chose a comfortable couch in our school.

To document these great areas of learning, Mr. Fullerton and Mr. Krause asked staff to send in a picture via email or text of their learning environment and who they were with.  After receiving the pictures a place to house the photos was needed.  Before doing this, the Over App was used to include messages that were sent with the picture.  The Over App allows for text to be placed on a picture.  A Google Drive folder could be accessed by both men so they could simultaneously upload pictures to the same digital area.  To share the folder, the two gentlemen placed the link on their Google Docs agenda.  This work flow provides digital documentation of successes from the original agenda.

I am extremely proud of our middle school administration team as they are utilizing the technology to enhance their learning environment.  As they become familiar with the technology, they can offer innovative technology solutions for our teachers!

View Their Story!