What is a PLAYDATE you ask?
PLAYDATE is a new kind of conference event.
​NO presenters. NO agenda. Just PLAYing.
Think about the last time you attended an ed tech professional learning event. Oftentimes we leave full of new knowledge and a list overflowing with new apps, programs and skills to try out.  However, once we return to the "real world" we lack the time and support to actually try out these new tools.
At PLAYDATEs educators from around the area join together for a few hours and just play.  They work together to learn about ed tech apps, programs and tools with one another.  There are no presenters, no experts and no agenda.  Simply time to play, tinker and explore all at no cost!

Check out the images from our Day.  Kudos to all of the partipants.  See you new year.

Stay informed about where and when to participant in a MI PLAYDATE on the REMC Website.

MI has adopted the Senate Resolution No. 47 commemorating this week as STEM Awareness Week.

REMC12W would like to make sure you are aware of resources and professional learning focused on STEM learning.  Check these links out, utilize in the classroom, grow your own proffesional learning, and share with others.

Another great resource that continues to grow for your SW MiSTEM connection is www.swmistem.org.  Check it out, bookmark it to refer back to the growing amount of great stuff!

Special thanks to Cathy Norris and Elliot Soloway for contributing to portions of this post!

OER 1.0 – Objects in Repositories
​Websites such Curriki, Gooru, CK12 and Khan Academy have long been repositories for free objects such as videos, PDFs, simulations, web sites, assessment items, etc. In the "early days" of OER (around 2015), gooru.org reported that it held 5 million OER objects. But, studies found that K-12 teachers were spending six to 10 hours per week searching for OER objects — for supplements to their existing curricula. And, while there are exceptions, the dominant view is that teachers are not equipped by temperament or training — nor do they have the time — to stitch OER objects together into coherent OER lessons. Bottom line: OER 1.0 sounded like a good idea — free educational resources — but objects that are only supplemental to the curriculum and require considerable search time to find just didn’t/don’t sound like a cost effective use of a teacher’s time.

OER 2.0 – From Objects to Digitized Curriculum
Hearing from their "customers," OER sites started putting up whole OER courses. In 2016 Gooru listed 35 OER courses — semester-long curricula. More recently, Open Up Resources, a leader in OER curricula, raised $10 million and used a portion of that to commission Illustrative Mathematics to develop award winning math curricula for middle school (grades 6, 7, and 8). Bill McCallum, CEO of Illustrative Mathematics insists that these materials will remain free OER and are posted with the least restrictive Creative Commons licensing — "CC-BY." Users may take them — and do whatever you want with them!  While OER 2.0 resources are no longer just objects, the problem — as we see it — is that OER 2.0 curricula are, by and large, designed for a paper-and-pencil classroom, for a classroom where student access to computers is limited, at best. Yes, OER 2.0 curricula are on the computer, but they do not take advantage of digital resources. OER 2.0 curricula are just digitized versions of paper-and-pencil resources. 
We do understand where OER 2.0 curricula creators are coming from: equity is a real issue in America’s schools, and today it is estimated that 1-to-1 is in 50 percent of America’s classrooms. So, to maximize impact, design for paper-and-pencil classrooms.
But…

OER 3.0 – From Digitized Curricula to Deeply Digital Curricula1-to-1 is happening.
1-to-1 is the new normal. Chromebooks can be purchased for $60 apiece.  Fifth-graders now are smartphone owners. Providing speedy WiFi in classrooms is no longer rocket science engineering, nor is it cost-prohibitive. Yes, some educators warn that computers in the classroom can be distracting; students can move from reading on a website to playing games too easily! Keeping students on task on the computers is sincerely challenging just as keeping students on task has always been.
But, there is no going back to paper-and-pencil! The "kids these days" are digital; they are "picting" — not writing. Time to produce OER 3.0 — deeply digital curricula!  Time to push schools along; time to show schools exciting new opportunities for teaching and learning. Enter, stage right, Michigan’s GoOpen OER Roadmap Initiative!

Michigan’s #GoOpen OER Roadmap Initiative: Realizing the Promise of OER 3.0
To make a long story short, CN & ES are working with Michelle Ribant (Director of 21st Century Learning at Michigan Department of Education), Ann-Marie Mapes (Educational Technology Manager at Michigan Department of Education) and Tina Tribu (Instructional Technologist and Data Specialist KRESA, REMC 12W Director) to support — read: paying  — Michigan K-12 teachers to create deeply digital, lessons and units (multi-week curricula!) — implemented as visual, interactive, browser-based, device-independent Roadmaps.
20+ teachers met at the Regional Media Center in Ingham County, MI, on Dec 1, 2018 for a day-long workshop on how to use the Collabrify Roadmap Platform (a device-independent, collabrified, free tool that supports the full life-cycle for digital lessons) to build Roadmaps. (Interestingly, Ms. Mapes officially dismissed the teachers at 2:30 — but virtually no one moved; some teachers were still there at 4:30 when ES and CN left.) This "Roadmappers" group has since been busy creating, aligning with Michigan’s standards, evaluating against the Achieve Rubric, classroom testing, and finally posting Roadmap lessons and units onto Michigan’s #GoOpen OER microsite.

Michigan’s #GoOpen OER Roadmap Initiative: Next Steps
Be involved and join the team on May 4, 2019.  Learn and create for professional growth to benefit teachers and students around the world!  And, get paid to do so.  Check out this flyer for more information.

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​Students from Hackett Catholic Prep's App Development class were chosen for the Student Technology Showcase at the Capitol. The theme of their presentation was Storytelling with Bloxels. In class, students discussed the elements of a good game. Students decided engaging games are built around well told stories with player choice. "Because of the generous support of REMC12W, we were able to check out the Bloxels kit from TinkerZoo," stated Lorri Batsie, Media Specialist and Instructional Technologist at Hackett.

From the KRESA Instructional Technology Team (Lacey, Jeremie, Keith, & Tina) to you and your family.  Take some time to learn something fun and play outside! 

Great updates are happening in the world of  classroom technology  Meeting teacher and student needs is a focus that the three title mentioned companies are excelling towards.  Here are some of their latest moves:

​My colleague, Matt McCullough, posted a great resource on his blog about using fidget spinners educationally. As the spin of this school year winds down, I wanted to share one more lesson idea related to fidget spinners.
If you’re lucky enough to own some littleBits, here is a fun activity for your students: instructions to build a littleBits fidget spinner!

This year I had the opportunity to work with Dayna Cantu, Anthony DeRosa, and Delton Kellogg Middle School students in a makeshift makerspace. Basically, it was an unused classroom with some flexible seating, some cardboard boxes, and lots of old textbooks. We have cranked out some awesome stuff in there this year, including social studies and ELA digital storytelling. Some examples are coding Ollie to represent an immigration journey, adapting fairy tales and Tuck Everlasting to be told through Dash the Robot’s perspective, complete with cardboard settings, and storytelling with Bloxels.

Our littleBits fidget spinner was one of my favorites because the girls had to adapt the directions to work with the kit that Mrs. Cantu owned. They had to replace the input and output bits with others in the existing kit. I was proud of them for problem solving. Their spinner was constructed from cardboard. Then, they went into the hallway and created a whole video of the creation, which totally appealed to my current obsession with CrossBraining (in fact, Mr. DeRosa’s kids actually used GoPros during their littleBits lesson, which was a mechanical arm that threw ping-pong balls at each other).

To check out more fun ideas from Delton Kellogg, follow @lbatsie8, @avd111, @mrscantu5, or #dkschools.