Designing & Facilitating an Apple Tech Integrated Math Academy

Backstory

This is my first year as the Director of Mathematics for my school district. Something I got to do this year was create and facilitate math academies for both elementary and secondary educators. These are full day PL experiences. In designing these experiences with my team, I got to leverage my prior knowledge as a digital learning coach and math teacher.

Elementary Academy

The purpose of the elementary math academy was to increase our district's capacity to implement the Math Workshop model of instruction to improve student achievement. For this learning experience, I wanted to model as much of the model of instruction and leverage technology to enhance the experience.

I created a learning journal in Pages that participants used to document and reflect on their learning throughout the day. I also used a Keynote with the dynamic background that drew the attention of the room and spurred a few new questions about creating in Keynote.

Here's a link to the bulb page I created to summarize and reflect on the experience. You will also find the files mentioned above on that page.

Secondary Academy

The purpose of the secondary math academy was to increase our district's capacity to implement the 14 practices of Building Thinking Classrooms by Peter Liljedahl. For this learning experience, I wanted to model as much of the model of instruction and leverage technology to enhance the experience.

I was going to create a learning journal in Pages, but my friend and colleague, Kelly Skillingberg, convinced me to use Numbers. Using Numbers gave me the specific added benefit of modeling some creative conditional formatting to give learners a low-stakes way to check their understanding.

Here's a link to the bulb page I created summarizing and reflecting on the experience. Within it you will find the Numbers learning journal, Keynote slides, and additional resources.

Let's Talk!

Please leave a comment on anything you'd like to share, and feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about integrating technology or anything else you saw.