might use all five books in the series for project ideas at all grade levels and for leadership strategies. We scaffolded the lessons across the series of books so they all flow together, and we organized all the grade-level books in this series in the same way to make it easy for all readers to see how the ideas link together. We believe this series will save you hours of preparation time.
Using This Book
This book features a series of lessons written for grades 9–12 teachers. As teachers, we know how challenging it is to come up with fresh ideas for the classroom each day, so we wrote our lessons in a way that makes getting started simple. That said, instructional coaches and administrators can also use the book’s lessons to support the students and teachers they lead.
Each of the chapters includes multiple topical sections, each with three lesson levels—(1) novice, (2) operational, and (3) wow, spelling NOW. Once we arrived at the three levels, it felt almost like a Choose Your Own Adventure book instead of a step-by-step recipe book. Make your lesson selections based on what your students can already do. For example, in chapter 4, we introduce the topic Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Data (page 101). The novice lesson in this section covers how students can use forms to create polls and surveys to gather data on a topic they study. But maybe your students already know how to do that, or maybe you have specific students who are ready for an increased challenge. You can advance those students to the operational lesson, which involves them taking data they collect and understanding how to analyze the data to find meaning. Students who have mastered both concepts are ready to showcase their learning for a broader audience, hence the wow lesson on publishing and presenting data.
Each lesson begins with a learning goal, phrased as an I can statement, written in student-friendly language. These statements help students understand the learning goal and make the learning experience purposeful. When students more clearly understand what they can do and where they are going, learning happens. This is important because it means that students are taking ownership of their learning. We then explain to you what students will learn from the lesson and the tools you can use to make it work, and we provide a stepped process you can follow to accomplish the learning goal. All lessons wrap up with subject-area connections that feature ideas you can use to adapt the lessons to different content areas, like English language arts, mathematics, and science.
A unique addition to this book is the addition of a career and technical education (CTE) connection for every lesson. In this category, we include all types of CTE courses, such as agricultural education, entrepreneurship, culinary arts, web design, and many more. As you read through the CTE connections, you may find classes your school does not offer, but because many schools are starting to partner with local community colleges to create dual-credit courses, we include connections for all types of classes. In some districts or regions, there are career centers offering a wide range of classes, and we also want to make sure these teachers and students have lessons that apply to their content areas.
Along the way, we also provide teaching and tech tips in this book’s scholar’s margins to provide useful insights. Finally, we have included discussion questions at the end of each chapter so you can use this book with your team for professional development.
Chapter 1, “Embracing Creativity,” has you teach students to create multimedia products, rather than just consume them. Using the lessons in this chapter, you can help students develop their ability to creatively use images, video, and audio in their work to create products that show the full range of their learning.
Chapter 2, “Communicating and Collaborating,” includes lessons to develop students’ ability to engage in the four Cs of communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. Students will learn to work better together and provide each other with constructive feedback as they create group projects and share them with authentic audiences that exist beyond classroom walls.
Chapter 3, “Conducting Research and Curating Information,” helps you develop students’ ability to find information by creating research plans and using advanced search techniques as they investigate and offer solutions to real-world problems. Students will then strengthen their evaluation skills as they determine when they find reliable sources that have limited bias.
Chapter 4, “Thinking Critically to Solve Problems,” covers how to teach students learning strategies for using digital tools to stay organized when researching challenging problems, to improve work flow and manage time, and to collect and analyze data they can later publish and present to authentic audiences.
Chapter 5, “Being Responsible Digital Citizens,” helps you teach your students what it means to be digital citizens and make positive contributions to online culture by establishing and cultivating a healthy digital footprint for themselves and others. High school students especially need to know that what they put on the Internet stays on the Internet and can affect their ability to enter college and find jobs. We also offer lessons to reinforce to students the importance of respecting ownership by properly citing copyrighted sources and avoiding plagiarism.
Chapter 6, “Expanding Technology and Coding Concepts,” explains how to grow students’ online presence by having them create digital portfolios of their work, make better use of their personal technology, and develop their computational and design skills through coding.
In the appendix, we include an alphabetical list of technology terms and resources. This includes a comprehensive list of apps, websites, and technology tools referenced in the book along with a description of each resource.
Building Background: Know Before You Go
Readers should be aware of a few additional concepts regarding this content before they begin engaging with the lessons and chapters that follow. We want to briefly mention suggestions for the sequence in which readers use the lessons in the book, discuss the concept of learning management systems (LMSs) and common education suites like G Suite for Education that are a critical part of this book’s lessons, emphasize the importance of following policies regarding student privacy and Internet use, and discuss how assessment connects with this content.
Sequence of Use
Although we organized this book in an optimal way, we invite you to move among the lessons in whatever sequence you like. Lessons range in difficulty so that you may meet your students at their level. Some concepts and apps will be new to students, requiring you to offer them more basic lessons that help get them started. Other students you can advance more quickly, perhaps starting off with an operational lesson or even going straight to a topic’s wow lesson. You know your students best, so use our NOW lesson format to fit their needs.
Each of these lessons requires some form of app or technology platform to accomplish a learning goal. We offer a variety of suggestions you can deploy with each lesson, but do not limit yourself or your students to our examples. Apps change. They disappear entirely. The best app for a job when we wrote this book may not remain the best one for the job when you read this book. Because of this, we designed each lesson to have adaptability so you can use it with whatever tool best suits your classroom. We don’t teach the app; we teach the classroom process.
Learning Management Systems and Education Suites
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