PD: Personalized and Diversified

Hello, everybody. Welcome, to PD. Personalized and diversified. My name is, oh, this is great. So I clicked the wrong button. Alright.

My name is Phil Gerose. We've been talking about AI a lot, so I used an AI photo of just so I could look cool and trendy like all the kids do. My big title is instructional innovation support specialist. Essentially, I am an instructional technology coach in my district. I'm one of four of them.

I'm from the Kenmore Tonawanda, union free school district, which is just outside of Buffalo, New York. So I'm from Western New York. Home of the Buffalo Bills, boo, you know, they like to tug our heartstrings. I am a Canvas certified educator and I'm also, an ST certified educator. We are a district of about sixty seven hundred kids from K to twelve across eleven sites, and so the four tech coaches including me, we make our runs to all the buildings.

And, one of the things we do in addition to providing curricular support is, and coaching support is also lead, PD across the district. My Twitter handle or X handle I don't know. I guess my I feel like my students could have made a better logo, but it's fine. Is there in the bottom right corner? I'm going to apologize. I was in a mad dash this morning because I saw people presenter struggle with Internet.

I was gonna take you into live Canvas, so I've recorded some videos for us to watch, Jason. You can actually get a preview of what stuff looks like inside my instance, in Canvas, so hopefully that'll work for everybody. So in thinking about what makes Great PD what makes PD, great PD, is really the same thing that, is good about teaching. Right? It's the same thing. The good things that happen in your classroom are the same same things I believe, should happen in whatever professional development you're running.

If you want teachers to work a certain way, you want them to to teach a certain way, you have to also demonstrate how to do Right? You have to lead by example. And so providing opportunity for choice, being learner centered, and meeting learners where they are are all things that we should focus on with our teachers just as much as we do with our students. So those are some guiding principles I have. So why use Canvas for PD? So We really, are, you know, along our journey of implementing Canvas across our district in five through twelve. And, we started using Canvas for PD at our staff development center officially adopted Canvas as our as our, LMS for all of our PD at our staff development center in our district.

A few years ago, and so we've got instructors rolling along in it. So why use Canvas for PD? Well, it unites everyone around the shared vision of Canvas. Everyone understands that all learning through Canvas. Canvas is where learning happens in our district where we have all our information stored. It becomes a one stop shop for both teachers and students, and in some cases, support staff.

Right? We have our staff development center serves everybody in our district from the the the mechanic who learns new things about how to fix an engine all the way up to administrators who are doing some book studies. So it helps everyone unite everyone around Canvas as being our one stop shop. It's helped helps to demonstrate what's possible in our own teacher's courses. So as they're building, if we have instructors who are building innovatively in their own PD, then the teachers go, oh, how did you do that? I want to know how to do that too. And it provides a lot of flexibility.

There's Canvas is constantly innovating with flexibility. We're gonna look at some of the features in Canvas that already exist and some brand new feature that, really help you provide flexibility in your PD. I'm by no means of a complete expert. I would love to be more involved in all these things in our district there's only, you know, so much of, so much time to go run. So we have a lot of different formats that you can use Canvas for.

You can use them as a reference resource, which we'll talk about first. You can do fully online courses. We have courses that run fully online, which are asynchronous. They never meet with the teacher at all. In our staff development center.

We have, recently added some hybrid courses where our teachers will provide, set office hours for for participants in our courses to stop by and meet the instructor and ask questions. We also have some who have like a live meeting, then it transitions to Canvas, and they do work in Canvas, and then they come back together at the end to share their outputs or share, different ideas or thoughts they had along the way. And then we have fully in person workshops that then also use Canvas as sort of like the reference at the end. It's the takeaway at the end. I've done some stuff in Canvas live, And now I have this course that lives in my dashboard, or, you know, falls off, and then no one can find it.

It's under all courses. We know how that works. Right? Put a star next to it, so it doesn't go away. But, we have some courses that are fully in person that also have a canvas component to it, even if the participants aren't doing something actively in it, they actually then have a resource to take with them. So some guiding bulls about designing courses work the same for teachers or same for developing professional development as they do for our students.

So I love the fundamental five comes out of Canvas. Maybe some of you have seen it before. It's not really it's like the center for leadership or someone from Instructure will correct me on that later. The fundamental five, and Chris Giles, who you may know from Twitter, Oh, Canada Tweets, right? He's here today presenting. He has modified the fundamental five a little bit, that a good LMS or a good core setup should allow students to know what what's going on, what's due, when it's due, how do I find it, which is the one that he add, and how did I do? Providing feedback, because I find that providing teacher feedback is just as important as us providing our students feedback.

So I will find a lot of people have talked about it. I love when I'm doing a course, we do this, being more productive in Google tools course that I run with a colleague of mine, and I love that every couple assignments, I just am at home, and I pop on the video in the SpeedGrader, and I just record a little personalized message to them because I think it develops that personal feedback, that personal touch, they feel more connected to me as an instructor. And also on top of that, I really have been, like, drawn into, UDL, the universal design for learning, thinking about how learn learners are gonna engage with the lesson, thinking that, you know, we have multimodal learners in our classroom. We have multimodal teacher learners as well. And so we need to be considered of that.

And, so keeping those guidelines in place while you're designing your PD. And please also, at any time, if you have a question, please feel free stop me because I will talk. So reference resource. Recently in, a canvas castors now in structure cast, podcasts, instructor cast. I think that's what's the new name.

Right? Okay. Podcasts. They've been calling it a lot. They've been calling it the principal's corner, which I didn't know was a thing until recently because I've been calling them, either our building sites or our class pages. So these these, I would put under the category of reference resource, meaning that it's a static, not static, but it's a course that exists that teachers and staff members can go to to find out more information and do learning on their own.

So we have two such courses in our, that come to mind when I think about this. One is our teaching and learning in a one to one classroom. And in that course, we basically have our tools, all the high impact tools that we believe exist in our district, things like Paradox, WeVideo, those tools, we have them divided up into assessment tools, engagement tools, creation tools, and teachers can go there and learn more about those tools on their own. So if they're looking for more information about how to do something with an with a tool and they can't get to a coach right away, or they wanna started and dip their toe in, we have developed that site that one to one, teaching and learning classroom site there for them to just dig in and just get star We've also included information about, how to use our SIS. So, our we use Infiti Campus.

So I've developed a whole series of videos and directions on how to how to set up your grade book at the beginning of the year, how to post grades for report card, all that stuff that you send out via email a thousand times a year, we've put in one site. Is it perfect? No, but we're working on it. Of course, it has to be updated frequently. The other new addition is the engagement playbook, so we are now launching this huge engagement playbook in our district starting in September. There'll be a big roll out at our opening days at the end of August.

And this engagement playbook has information about high impact engagement strategies, digital or not. And so I have, I'll show you a video of what that looks like in just a second, but the ideas behind the reference resource is you, like, a consistent look, you give teachers multiple means of representation, on some instructional pieces. We have some text. We have some video. We might have some downloads, some examples to look at.

You drive business to Canvas. We have a building site at one of our middle schools that has a Google drawing embedded on one of the page, and it's the front of the building and a support staff member sits out front with an iPad and let lists which bus has arrived to the front of the building. And so the teachers just load the canvas site, they project it and like they go there to find out which buses have arrived and which ones haven't. So you're driving business to Canvas, instead of having people like, well, I don't need to use it. I'm gonna, like, slowly back away from it.

I don't really have to, deal with it. And you ensure that every course becomes a reference at completion, which is great about using, Canvas for any type of course. So here's our engagement playbook, I use Genally at the bottom, so I got a little fancy, free tool to embed anywhere, which is really cool. And you can see the look of this course, all the pages look very similar, They all have really easy to use, buttons to go through, and you can see that we designed every page looks like this with the same sort of icons in it so that teachers can easily navigate it and know what they're looking for. So this video will repeat if you want to take a look at it.

Again, so we've identified five main strategies, and each strategy has If you click on any one of those questions, it drops down. I didn't video that, but it has low prep to high prep. And you can see that we provided a resource for teachers. Now, we're building that. This is our first launch of it this fall.

Out of the committee, we are gonna film, teachers actually using the strategies in their classrooms, and we will add those to this resource. So teachers have one spot to go to on their Canvas dashboard to look up more about engagement strategies they might wanna use. Yes. Correct. Yes.

Yes. The question was, we've got, like, one for technology, and we've got one for pedagogy, and that's what's sort of what's happening right We were gonna embed one in the other, but they wanted a big launch, and it's, you know, it's a lot of hands in the pot, as you know. Alright. So for hybrid and fully online courses, you can do a lot of different things to help keep learners moving. One of them is date driven PD.

Some teachers really like the fact. We have some online, some people who teach online who really like week one, you will do these things, and then week two, you will do these things. And so they use the module date unlocking to help make that more automated for themselves. Then they can grade some things on the beach, but they don't have to worry about publishing stuff on a certain date because Canvas will do that for them. And then my colleague, Mary Lynn and I, teach that course being more productive with Google tools, and we use learner driven PD, so that we, which is they guide when they're ready to do the next step.

So we've put module prerequisites on, the course, and we've also put module requirements on the course as well. And what I like about that is really it really does help the learner see, yes, I've done this, no, I haven't. And what is expected of them? So I don't know if you can see me, but, like, I love the fact that when we put module requirements on something, it says to the person, I've gotta do this, I've gotta do this, I've gotta view, I've gotta submit, It'll tell me I've gotta earn at least three points on this, what have you, and so that they can work through the course, at their own pace. And it's really easy to do if you've never done it. It's on our, favorite thing on the right hand side there, the three little dots, the snowman, the kebab, in Buffalo candidates, the Tim bits, the doughnut holes, they sell it Tim Hortons.

So many different things you can call if you click it, remember, there's always more to do when you click the three dots in canvas, and there you can see the prerequisites and the requirements that we've set up there. And we really do like to use it and the participants seem to like it as well. You will notice that everything in our course here in this this snippet of it is worth one point because we make the course, all the assignments are complete or incomplete. Because in staff development, they're not really earning a grade. We just mark them as complete or incomplete.

We give it one point or zero points and they move on. Oh, let me take that back. Discussions are three points because we want them to participate with other people, so we do give them credit for every time they participate in the in the discussion. I know, chintzy, but we we do it anyway. Providing an individualized pathway is a lot more work.

Right? Like, I know, I have actually spent more time in that blended learning slide because when we think about blended learning and we think about, like the work of Kathlyn Tucker and others, think about that individualized pathway is like the goal. Right? Like, if we could if we could individualize the course for every single person who's here, it would be really engaging for them, and it would really help, help them learn at their own pace and meet them where they are. So one way you can do that is using mastery pathways. I think that mastery pathways are really useful. I think they stress the heck out of everybody.

Right? It's really tough to think about mastery pathways because it is a lot of front loading work to do, right? Gotta think about where are they gonna go? How many slide? How many choices am I gonna have? What am I gonna do? And so you really, in the most simplest way, is to use mastery pathways in the same way you would use it for students, and that is to just do checks for understanding. Throw some very low impact quiz in there that's not really gonna be stressful for them, but says, Hey, did you review this? Did you actually learn something from the previous, section? We had a, One of our social workers in the district taught a course, and he was really, his course was really about what can I give you to help students with social emotional learning in like one minute snippets? So he made a series of one minute videos, and at the end of every section, there was a quick quiz. For you to take. And if you didn't, then it told you, Hey, go back and watch video one, this is where you'll find the answer to this, and then retake the quiz. And so then that really enabled people to, like, go back.

Review, come back and move forward. Also pre testing. I have not done this personally, but certainly if you have something like like you're teaching people about Google, or you're teaching something, something to somebody that somebody might already have some base in. It might be handy to throw a pretest in there to say, Hey, do you really need to know this? So take this quick quiz. Let's evaluate where you are as an instructor, where you are as a teacher, And then, we'll not evaluate where you are as a teacher.

You know what I meant. I hope. But, hey, you really suck. You missed this pretest? No. You, You take the pretest, and then it unlocks other items based on what your personal needs are.

So what could be more individualized than that? Hey, I don't really need to do this of stuff because I already know that. I'm ready to move on to the next stuff. So that does become tricky, obviously, if we are a district like we are that awards hours and credits for taking staff development courses, then you want to make sure that everyone gets the same thing out of, the same course if they've taken it. So another thing that's really cool, and if you've been, I believe it's in the CCE program, it's in the Canvas certified educator program, if I'm not and someone can correct me if I'm wrong. But using mastery pathways in really clever ways is sometimes helpful too.

Like, making a fake quiz, which you probably maybe some of you have thought about, maybe some of you have not thought about. But, you know, there's a something to be said for learners having choice in what they're learning. Right? So maybe you have a selection of tasks that you want your teachers to do, and you want them to choose two of the tasks. Well, in new quizzes, maybe that's a scary term for some people. Don't be scared.

Don't be scared. Just come with us. We'll hold your hand. Just reach out. In new quizzes, you can actually set different point values based on what answer choice people choose in a multiple choice.

So follow my thinking here. So if I give choice a six points, and choice b, three points, and choice the third choice, their third option there, one point, then I can go into my mastery pathway and say, okay, everyone who scored between four and six, that'll be the people who chose choice A, will be assigned to these two things. And everybody who scored the three who got the three points, if I set my range right, that area, they'll get assigned the second two assignments, and if they didn't if they scored less than that, then they will get the third pathway. So you it's using new quizzes and mastery pathways in a tricky, probably not the reason why they were built that way. But It really is kind of a cool way to get people to select their own path and have it automate itself.

So I can I'm out of the picture. They choose what choice they want. Boom. Canvas signs the next two things they need to do, and I'm out of the I'm out that piece of stuff is out of my way. I think the thing about, When we heard today, the chief architect talk about all the stuff that's coming in Canvas, it's about taking the high cognitive stuff that is low satisfaction out of your life.

Right? It's about a using AI and using some automation to help make some stuff easier. So I don't have to go back in and go through the quizzes and go, oh, you know, Sally wanted, and one A and one B, I gotta go in into that bottom box and, like, personally assign it to everybody. I don't have to do that with mastery pathways And I think using Masterite Pathways for choice is really, really cool. I'm not I know I'm not the only one who has talked about this before. I know in terms of like doing stuff within your classroom.

There's been other presentations on that too. So, back in the old archives of Instructure Con, the online ones, there's one in there about, using this in an ELA classroom with students too. I just think it's a really, really cool use for quizzes and mastery pathways. That you may not be thinking of. Alright.

New thing. Has anyone in here tried course pacing? Anybody. A little bit. Right? Dabbled. I just, I, I, like, made a little sandbox course I was gonna take you into, and I was like, internet.

Now, anyway, So course pacing is really cool, I think, for courses that you want to be able to run on their own once someone gets added to the course. So I think about course pacing as being really useful in something we do really poorly in my district, which is that if you start as a new teacher and you get hired, before August twentieth, which is the date of our new teacher orientation, you get invited to new teacher orientation, you come and you get all this PD. But if I'm a long term sub that gets hired September fourteenth, I get nothing. Right? If I'm a support staff member and I start at some point in the school year, I get nothing. I don't get PD.

Now, this is, bashing my district. I'm just saying, we just don't have a mechanism to do that. But I I've always thought, like, it would be really cool, and we've talked I've talked to the former staff development center, director, and I plan on talking to the new one about developing a series of corsets that are basic stuff that you need to know to get started in the district. That when someone gets a higher date, someone just has to go in and add that person to Canvas and start them in whatever it is. Learn to use Gmail in our district.

Learnt for, you know, there's a lot of stuff that we don't teach our support staff members. They come in, and I feel bad for them because they're overwhelmed by all the different tools they have to use. They have to learn the They have to learn they're not a Google person. That's kind of stuff. But creating a series of PD that basically run on their own it would be really handy because it doesn't matter what the start date is.

Canvas will adjust the dates for you. So the way course pacing works is you develop a course with a series of activities, and then you tell Canvas, alright, I'm gonna use course pacing because either my admin or I have turned on the feature options It is in beta, so just as a heads up. But, it's there. Turn down the feature, you turn on course pacing in your course. So this is the other thing.

I know I this is something sometimes I get a little annoyed at, you know, you gotta scroll down, you know, the settings page, how there's stuff that's like hidden from you, and you're like, oh, I gotta click this more thing. Great. It's at the bottom of that list, of course basing's enabled, there's a little checkbox that says, enable course pacing in this course, and you turn that on, and then you get a fancy new menu item on your left hand course navigation that says course pacing, and you click And when you click it, you tell, and the next thing is hopefully a video. Let's hope Oh, yeah. There it is.

Look at that course pacing. You hit course pacing, and you create a course pace. When you create a course pace, you basically tell Canvas, hey, I think that this activity will take them two days. I think this needs to be due three days after they've started the course. I think this and Canvas is adjusting the due date, so I did this today.

So these are like real dates from today. It adjusts the due date based on today's, you could see what it would be like if someone started the course on July twenty seventh. Just as an example, now it's going to adjust that based on when the new person is enrolled in the course. So now that course, that person will then have umpteen days to finish the course by then. Now, I could have, if it's a wide open course, I could just set the due date to be, hey, you've got thirty days within your hire date to finish this, right, and set the due date for everything at thirty days, then I can just come back in the course and say, oh, yeah, this person's completed it, or no, they haven't.

Here's a little nudge nudge, or, I could use, you know, message students who haven't completed the course and say, Hey, come back. The other thing I think is really cool is that under settings, sorry, I know this video is gonna repeat in a second. But in the upper right hand corner, when you start course pacing, there is a settings button that allows you to skip weekend days, so it only counts work days, and then you can also set blackout dates. That means I can actually set dates for, like, vacations and other things or, unpaid days. Like, for example, our support staff don't get paid on snow days.

So we would take those days out as days that they would, you know, have to do that if we weren't paying them separately for that. So there's a lot of options in here. It's still growing. I would imagine that pacing is gonna continue to grow because I think it is a really, really cool feature, and I think it's a great way to deliver PD that runs itself. Right? I'm not necessarily talking about this as being something where I'm an instructor that's actively involved, but something that's sort of off to the side that's running and in my mind onboarding stuff is like, I don't know.

This is like amazing to me. This is like where I wanna be. Yeah. So I would just I can just add a section to that and it will just adjust from the star date of that section or I can add they just added right she announced that they would said today on the stage. Right? There's individual student pacing.

I'm looking at mine structured people on the back, like they know. Yes. So there's individual student pacing that gets set up. So I might actually, in my mind, I was thinking of creating one course that I would just continue to add people to over the years, but you're right. It might get crazy.

I have never course copied oh, no. Actually, I have course copied, and it does copy the course spacing. Right? Yes. It does. Cause I did that.

I tried it was gonna do it live, and I thought, gotta actually make a brand new course to uncorse pace and recourse pace it, if I'm not mistaken. At least that's how it worked when I tried this on my own, and then anyways, I started fresh to do this little video for you today. Alright. Alright. All their ways of providing, engaging PD digital choice boards are a good way to do that.

I mean, we use choice boards all the time with our students, why can't we use them with teachers? I'm gonna show you a really cool, thing that we just did with our state organization. Embedding interactive content, I'm also gonna show you I made a video. I was gonna take you in live, and then you can watch me fumble through it, because I'm really bad at using my mouse, my track pad on my, Mac to go around a virtual space, but embedding co spaces and using our LTIs, like, We are a Paradox district where an Ed puzzle district. It doesn't make sense. Like, if I want, you know, the Ed puzzle integration, if you've not looked at that LTI, my god, I love the fact that it's student, You can set a student paced paradigm.

They can work through the paradigm on their own and submit answers, and then they said, Oh, I'm done with the assignment. It automatically adds an extra slide. It submits, use the tools that you're using in your classroom with your staff, assuming that you have licenses. Like, you know, our whole domain has access to paradact and EdPuzzle. So that means I can import an EdPuzzle into any staff development course that I'm using.

An innovative way to use digital choice boards. So, a quick backstory, if I have time. Oh my god. I have so much time. What is happening? Sorry.

I'm talking too fast. The New York and me. Anyway, in New York state, New York state, education department provided a grant to districts if they applied called the smart start grant, to help accelerate teacher learning around technology and around our new, New York state, computer science and digital fluency standards. My district was one of the districts that, in conjunction with, the Tonawanda City District. I know you're thinking how many Tonawanda districts are there in western New York, and there's three of us.

But, we, in conjunction with the city of Tonawanda District got together, and we developed, the grant where we enabled all our teachers to get Google certified, in addition to taking some, online courses. And then if they go through the second year, a second cohort, then they actually get some supplies for their courses based on the amount in the amount of money in the grant for that year. So we've been able to do a lot of cool things. But Our, that is the conduit for all of that is our state organization, which is, the state affiliate for ST, called Nyskate. And so as part of this course, as part of this set of courses that teachers have to take, they have some choice in what courses they get to take within this program to complete it.

So picture that. You've got a program in which I've gotta take multiple courses. So rather than dumping the content from all the courses in one big course, we have a separate course for each of the little components So we have you can see CS and DF and k one. I just took a small screenshot of this, but there's like a million of them. CS and DF in two three four six There's one for seven eight, there's one in the arts, there's one in phys ed, there's one in, forgot what the other ones are.

Plus there are other elective courses they can take on different technology tools. Well, it became a pain in the rear end for our state organization, of which, like, there are three full time employees and the rest are all volunteers to keep registering people. So what we did is we created a canvas course that holds the whole cohort of teachers that are going through the program, and then we created a page. And each one of these badges is the self enroll link for each of the courses. So now a teacher in the program comes to this page, they go, oh, I wanna take the CS and DF K one, I click on it, and it takes me to the self enroll page link.

It takes that link. We just, you know, attach the link to it. Takes them to the link to that course, and then they're automatically enrolled in the course, and they can get going on that course. And in our shell course, we have this is a page, and then after that is an assignment for them to upload their completion certificate from that course, and then it opens up the next series of courses that they have a choice from. So not really quite a digital choice board, but a way to make our lives much more efficient using some of the features within Canvas and that self enroll link, which to me is always scary because it's also hidden under that more menu at the bottom of the settings page.

Sometimes we hide the best things. I don't know, you know. So It's under there, but we copy that self enroll link, and we use it. And teachers have really found a lot of success. It allows them to just work at their own pace because they have from now until February twenty eighth, twenty twenty, or whatever date it is, twenty seven, is it a leap year? No one knows.

Alright. So, they have until the end of February to complete all the work so they can work at their own they can sign up for courses as they want to without having to constantly reach out to someone to register for the course. I need this next. I need this next. So a good way to encapsulate a whole program of a variety of courses into one central shell.

The other thing here that I'm gonna show you is, something I'm really proud of, maybe you think it's nerdy. I don't know. But we love coast bases in our district. We've been using it more and more with our students as creation tools. Coast bases is a an AR VR creation tool.

It does have a, merge cube add on so students can actually build in co spaces, and then you can use, an iOS device and hold up the merge cube and what they've built in co spaces like appears in their hand. So, my colleague Dave has been building rocket ships with our third and fourth graders and three d printing them. And then handing them a merge cube so they can see what their rocket looks like before they actually print it, and they can take a look at it, which is kind of cool. But as part of our learning about, part of a professional development day, two years ago on, blended learning. One piece about learning blended learning, we thought that teachers should walk through a classroom for what it looks like.

So in This PD Day, which was all built inside Canvas, I built embedded a co space that teachers can then walk around in and explore. So again, using you may recognize the rug. You, but, building this so that teachers can actually walk through, they can have the full experience of co spaces. It is better when it's full screen. I didn't full screen it because I want you to see it was in Canvas.

But, all of the features that are in co spaces were totally embeddable inside Canvas so that people can walk around. They can play the videos that I've embedded on the walls inside that co space, they can walk around the room, they can explore, all the, all the good learning happening there and they can go and see what everyone's saying about blended learning in the classroom. So really thinking about how can I be as engaging with my professional learners as I can with my students in my classroom? And using those tools, because the teacher saw I had a couple teachers see this tool and they're like, oh my god, how do I use that in my can you come in? And it was a great coaching opportunity for me to come in and say, okay, let's let's build this. Let's make this happen. What do you wanna do? How are we gonna use it? Is this the right tool to use? Right? Because we do wanna constantly think about what is the best tool for us to use for learning.

We just wanna like slap a tool around there and and be crazy. So I think that we just really always need to think about, think of the learners first, then adapt and shape your course to meet their need. So what are the needs of the teachers? We have found in our district, for example, that that Google Tools course we ran online during the pandemic, because, of course, we weren't in person. We were sort of in person, but not in person, because we weren't running staff development in person. And so then we got back into full time in person, and we found out that really our support staff would have preferred to have learned that online, learn that in person.

So then we went back to running some of those courses fully in person for some groups because they really did want an in person learning experience versus an online experience. But our in person experience, our in person, staff members receive the same canvas course that our online teachers do. So they have access to all the same resources regardless of whether they took it in person or online. So really thinking about what are the needs of your learners what are they looking for, what's going to work best for them is really how to proceed, with making professional development more personalized and diversified. That is, I talked way too fast, so I apologize.

But, any questions? Yes. So we have, we have thought about that. Our issue is that in the way we run our staff development center is that in our teacher contract, if you do twenty hours of PD, you basically pay ten dollars a credit hour for those twenty hours and you get a two thousand dollar check at the end of the year. So So the issue became so it's a nice benefit, but the issue became then, if I change the course that's attached to that badge, is that equivalent or is that a different? Do you know what I'm saying? So it was tough because sometimes we'll run a course for a while and it will be like a five hour course and then we'll realize, this is really more like an eight hour course, but now they have the badge that's the same. So I think like rectifying in our heads like how to deal with the hours being different, but the badge being the same is where we got stuck in our district so far.

We have a new director of staff development Center, I had took over as chair of the policy board, so I'm excited to see what we're gonna do now, but as we move forward, but we do have other districts in our area who do do that idea of badging and they like they're loaded up at the bottom of their email signature with badges. Which is great. And in fact, they get badges. That state grant that I showed you, they get a badge for every one of those courses. So a lot of times, we'll see people with their smart start badge at the bottom after they finished a series of courses.

But I agree with you. I think we're just having a problem with Yeah. Yeah. And I think that makes a lot of sense, and I think that that's a great way to do it. I think also it really does speak in our minds to the thing that we looked at when we really think about badges is like level one, level two, level three, like Google certification, like, really thinking about, okay, I've got Ed puzzle level one because I took a course on it.

Maybe that's just the basics, but level two is the pedagogy behind it. Right? Like, so what do those badges look like and what do they contain and how do you maintain them? And then if you stop offering, of course, because of low enrollment, I just it became too much, and so I think we just abandoned it for a period of time, but I certainly would love to go back and look at it because I think, I mean, badging is incredibly powerful, for sure. Other questions, thoughts? That's a great question. Yeah. It's just for our district right now at the moment.

I'm sorry. Maybe after we update it, the four, the three coaches, and I the three of the four of us total, that all have the same title, we're overhauling the whole darn thing this summer, which is becoming more of a project than we thought was gonna be, just because of the way we we built it during the pandemic initially, and initially we ran, opening days of twenty twenty fall of twenty twenty for us as a district was an online learning summit. And that's where we developed sort of those, like, hey, this is about this product, this is about this product, because teachers got choose, which avenue they went down for the day, for that day in August. And then we transformed it into the this reference site that it is now, and it's just some of the pieces have not been visited in a while. And so we just have to fix that, so it is.

I mean, if I put it in the comments, I'll let you know. Right? You never know. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's a good question. So the question is about, I'm repeating it for the microphone, for those people at home. The question is about, the student paced classes where they're running discussions at their own pace, right? What happens in those discussions? And how do you keep the course moving? Right? I'm gonna summarize, right? Like, how do you keep the course moving, if not, everyone's enrolled in the course at the same time? So in those particular courses, where you saw that Google tools, being productive and, yeah, being productive in Google Tools. They actually all have the same start date and end date. That does have a that has a start date and end date, but they can work.

So during the school year, I think we run that over five weeks. And in the summer, we run it over four, figuring that they have more time on their hands to do things. We, we struggle with that as well sometimes, and we do set a deadline for the very first thing they have to do in the course to make sure that they're active in the course in the first week. And then after the first assignment, everything else is due at the very last date of the course. So we do have some stragglers who, who slowly come along, and then we use the message students who to say, like, Hey, haven't seen you, like, are you are you still planning on participating in the course? Cause we do wanna drop them if they're not gonna do it.

But I agree with you. There's a fine line to walk there, and so Mary Lynn and I will fight her kids, her son plays hockey. And so she loves to, like, beat me to replying to discussion posts while she's at a hockey game, and I'll be like, oh, you already said what I was gonna so we usually hang back in those discussion posts until enough people have responded, and then we hop in just so that they can start. Moving the discussion along, but that is a challenge when we could end up with a whole bunch of people who just wait till the last day, and we haven't had that. We do have people who work who are so far ahead that then they have to wait and then go back to finish the other two posts.

Yeah. Right. I mean, in the end, if they don't, I mean, I know it's it's cheesy, but we do like one point for the your original post, and then, which you can't see anybody else's responses when you first respond, and then two additional points, and that's why I love the speed grader for using for discussions. It's so easy to look at everybody's responses on a page, and we got a little rubric, and it's real fast I call it Tinder. It's like Tinder.

Right? SpeedGrader is like Tinder. You're always swiping left and never right. And you're just like marking the points but, we do have people who do have to come back at the end to do it. It's just it's it's tricky. You're right, but we're not keeping anyone.

I mean, if they responded once and they were really far ahead, we're not, like, not giving them credit for the course. We have a minimum requirement with participation. It is trickier in fully online courses. You have to complete at least two thirds of the course to get any credit in our district for the course that you took. So it gets a little tricky with online courses with, like, how much is two thirds when we just left the thing open.

Right? But, especially at the end of the year, when people are like, oh, I don't have my twenty hours. What do I do? So I hope that answers it. It's it is tricky, though. You're right. So I don't know that I would use it in self paced courses.

I think that I would be afraid of the same thing happening I have had teachers accidentally roll over their discussion, add a section, and then the other kids, the other other kids, the other participants are still in the discussion, they're seeing everything from before. So you've gotta be careful about assigning discussions in that way. Yes. So our, so this is a great story. So expectation, I have more than five minutes left.

What do I have? Okay. Great. So, the question was about our expectations of use of Canvas in our district. We started using Canvas in twenty eighteen with a pilot group of teachers. We were with another not to be mentioned LMS.

Piloting that as well, and we ended up choosing, Canvas over this other LMS. We moved forward with it, I we had a series of leadership changes and also the pandemic in the middle of it, which slowed our adoption of it. So we are as of, August first turning off Google classroom for every student in eight through twelve. And so we will be exclusively Canvas eight through twelve. It's the only way our assistant superintendent said getty up and get on board, and this is how we're going to make it happen.

And, in August of twenty twenty four, we will turn off Google classroom for student access only teachers will still be able to get in there and see their stuff because they don't have the meltdown over it. Right? They, they, students in five through seven won't see it anymore either. So we will be fully Canvas five through twelve with a, use of different systems in K to four, which, you know, I'm gonna make a face that's not recorded on audio. So so that's that. So that's where we are.

Our PD has really been in Canvas. We still have a few teachers who are still using Google classroom for their to run PD. Teachers who run PD, still using it and I literally sit down with them, and I have Google classroom open on one screen in Canvas, and I go, let's make this look as close as possible and start with the basic Our big in with teachers this year, really, during our March deaf development day, was really saying, strip it down to almost nothing. I post what the assignment is and when it's due and how much it's worth and stop. If the kids don't turn it in online, they don't turn it in online.

But at least they have to be able to see what the assignments are. Then all of a sudden the teacher goes, well, I mean, I want my Google doc in there, and then you're like, whoa, oh, okay. So we have this chart that is, a basic model of Canvas, a basic plus model, and a luxury model, and the basic model is using the communication tools, posting assignments and when they're due, having a homepage of some sort, those are like the three main things, and the next level up is grading in canvas. Having students turn in work in Canvas, using message students who to message students, and then the luxury model is really more about design, user interface, mastery path, ways. Quizzes, sorry, is in the basic plus model.

So we have teachers all over the spectrum, but I think our district finally said we need to set an expectation of what we expect to see in Canvas, and this is what we expect to see. And honestly, like, I presented on the blended learning piece to our engagement task force that was tasked with running the engagement piece, but then my group of, coaches then wrote the engagement playbook, we presented blend and learning, and I literally had a teacher the day after I showed the mastery pathway, say, can you please come and show me how to make a mastery pathway? Like, it's about teacher need, and I think a lot of people used to say that on different things you'd listen to. It's like, they're gonna have a need for something, and you're gonna be able to open a door that then they're not gonna wanna shut because they're like, oh, I wanna know how to do that. And, oh, my kids now can do this. So I've had a lot of engagement from teachers this year on, oh, I wanna be able to do that, or I heard so and so was doing this.

How do I do it? I can I can certainly send hit me up on, hit me up on or email me or hit me up on Twitter? I'll be more than happy to. Oh god. I will Oh, my god. The no. I'm alright.

Okay. It's it's my first initial followed by my last name, p j a r o s z at k t u f s d dot org. You can email me and I'll I'll be more than happy to share with you that chart. We think it's really helped teachers frame using it if you're new to Canvas, certainly. But really putting other stuff in Canvas is really how you get everyone on board and administrators included really thinking about that.

I know we talked about the principal corner. Right? Is what they've talked about? Like, that resource site, we have a site for every class of of twenty twenty six, class of twenty twenty five, and we have administrators, counseling center, and the class advisors attached to that course so that they can push out information in one place. We have a building wide site at each building like I talked about so that the principals can push out information to their staff. And I said at the end of the year, you have these teachers fill out the stupid form. Did you turn in the keys? Did you do do do do? Make that a canvas something.

And then you'll be able to your clerical person can go through the grade book and go, yep, this person didn't do it. I can message the teachers who haven't, submitted that, right? Like, using the tools that we use with students with the adults in the in the room and in the district has really been changing. Thank you so much, everybody. This has been so great to be with you today.