Executive Summaries
21st Century Teaching and Learning Project Grants
2009-2010
Multi-District Collaboratives
Blackboard Consortium for the 21st Century – Sycamore Community, Deer Park City, Great Oaks, Indian Hill City, Oak Hills Local, Wyoming City Schools
The Blackboard Consortium, consisting of six member school districts,will provide professional development and technical assistance for use and implementation of the Blackboard Academic Suite. This project will create district and regional awareness of 21st-century teaching and learning in an online environment. The consortium professional development will focus on 21st-century skills (critical thinking, communication, collaboration, problem-solving and global awareness). The consortium will implement 21st-century learning practices utilizing Blackboard as the online environment in order to share, replicate and sustain 21st-century learning projects. Consortium members will learn how integrate 21st-century skills into teaching and learning to prepare students for a global, information based economy. In addition, the use of the grant dollars will provide opportunities for member districts to leverage collaboration and share best practices in 21st-century learning.
Teaching and Learning 21st Century Skills – Madison Local Schools, Monroe City Schools, Edgewood City Schools
“Teaching and Learning 21st Century Skills: Now and Later” is a collaborative initiative of Madison Local Schools, Edgewood City Schools and Monroe Local Schools, to further integrate the 21st Century Teaching and Learning concept in Butler County. The proposed project is to first facilitate an event where administrators, support staff and teachers are educated on the necessity and urgency of incorporating 21st century teaching and learning in their classrooms now. A second focus is to include goal setting and project planning for 21st century teaching and learning later, in the future of our districts. The Now and Later concept will encourage team members to foster ideas for a 21st century teaching and learning culture immediately and promote ongoing collaboration and development to create a vision for projects and programs of tomorrow, next semester, and five to ten years into the future
Creating Learning in the 21st Century (ICC)- Grant Partners Milford City Schools, Oak Hills Local Schools, and Southwest Local Schools
Using the 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning and an array of
systems thinking and dialogic tools, the Institute for Creative Collaboration at
KnowledgeWorks (ICC) will help Milford, Oak Hills, and Southwest schools begin a systemic transformation process. 4 Collaborative Learning Days will be facilitated with each district.
Intra-District Collaboratives
Ning Book Study: A Whole New Mind- West Clermont Schools
Welcome to the 21st Century Book Study! Through the use of a ning, students and teachers will interact with each other across grade levels and campuses. Interaction will be based upon Daniel Pink's book, A Whole New Mind. A virtual Professional Learning Community (PLC) will be created, with students and teachers as co-learners. Researcher James Gee reminds us that we learn best when working together, rather than learning from an "expert". In addition, face-to-face discussion time will be incorporated, with High Aims team members collaborating with teachers to deliver Daniel Pink's portfolio exercises. Document cameras will be used during these sessions.
21st Century Teaching and Learning: Pass It Forward – Little Miami Schools
The focus of this project will be to encourage teachers to collaborate in the creation of innovative instructional techniques that support 21st Century teaching and learning. Teachers will submit proposals for implementing 21st Century learning in their classrooms that focus on the areas of: critical thinking, self-directed learning by solving complex, multidisciplinary, open ended problems and collaboration. A review team composed of teachers, parents, administrators and business leaders will select up to five proposals where the teacher(s) will be allotted up to $1,000 to be placed in a Professional Development account for their continued growth and learning about implementing 21st Century teaching and learning. Upon completion the details of each selected project will be packaged and presented to other staff to use in their classrooms. The underlying concept of this project is to change the teaching and learning one innovative idea at a time through a pass it forward approach. Teacher learning drives student learning.
Architecture of Lakota’s 21st Century Educational Program
The Lakota Local School District is "operationally defining" a vision or framework for 21st century teaching and learning. Lakota has completed a first draft of a vision of 21st Century teaching and learning by Central Administration. Lakota has developed 21st century outcomes, competencies for each outcomes, and rubrics (adult language as well as student language) to define each aspect of the framework. The next step in the visioning process is to engage our building principals and school board members to refine our current vision. We would use the $2,500 mini-grant to purchase materials for each principal and school board member to build awareness and understanding of a vision of 21st Century teaching and learning.
21st Century Teaching and Learning: Expanding and Focusing the Conversations – Fairfield City Schools
Fairfield City Schools will be utilizing the structure of a book study to initiate a dialogue and create a common understanding of 21st Century Teaching and Learning among the certificated staff in our district. The book study will focus on the Tony Wagner book, The Global Achievement Gap. Book study groups will be organized in the various buildings and the district office. The project will culminate in a district-wide meeting of the building groups. This project will be the springboard for further district initiatives around the subject of 21st Century teaching and learning
Increasing Communication through Staff and Community Engagement – Madeira City Schools
Madeira City Schools has been engaged in conversations about skills for the 21st century for the past two years. Years one and two have been focused on groups of parents, teachers, and administrators recognizing the need for an infusion of 21st century skills within our schools' learning environments. The work of these groups has focused our district to this point on five essential questions that our school community must answer.
1. What are the 21st century skills needed in today’s global workplace that students must possess and how can we make them our own?
2. What are our current instructional delivery models and what teaching pedagogy best prepares and equips students with 21st century skills?
3. What must we do to accelerate our growth and increase opportunities for students, teachers, and our community?
4. How can we raise the bar and move more of our Madeira students to even higher levels of achievement?
5. How and what should we communicate to our community?
Learning About Other Cultures through Skyping- Norwood City Schools/Smart ED
The project entitled, “Learning about Other Cultures through Skyping” will provide a new opportunity for both local and international conversations in second grade classrooms. Norwood City Schools will be creating an interactive learning environment in one second grade classroom in the district as well as reaching out to other second grade classrooms locally and internationally to hold discussions and share new learning. We hope to improve student understanding of cultural practices and products of people on different continents in meeting the social studies standard of people in societies. This new learning will be obtained through readings, artifacts and skyping with students and classrooms in other countries. We hope to share this new learning with classmates locally through skyping as well.
Building Projects
Global Interactions – Warren County Career Center
In a Global Economy students and teachers need to be able to collaborate, share ideas and resources and solve problems. Students and teachers need to understand how to connect with the rest of the world. Global Interactions will allow students and teachers to interact with other students and teachers not only in the United States, but around the World. Working with a Higher Education Institution like MUM or Sinclair, high school and college students will get to work with an international company, like P&G or another company, and help them solve a problem
From Vision to Action: A Guide for the 21st Century – Mason City Schools
This past fall, all teachers at Mason High School were asked to read several articles about 21st century skills and post their reflections on a wiki. Grant participants will review this posted information and meet to discuss the impact of 21st century skills in the classroom. Through the discussions, teachers will create a planning guide to use as a reference for developing lessons that reflect 21st century learning. Teachers will use the guide to create and deliver a lesson in their classrooms, then meet together to reflect on the effectiveness of the guide as a planning tool and refine it before sharing it with the rest of the staff. This guide will be shared with all teachers and will allow them to enhance their instruction.
Learning by VideoConferencing – Kings Local Schools
Video conferencing technology is all the rage among corporations and recently, secondary and post secondary educators have begun taking advantage of video conferencing technology to support learning. Video conferencing equipment can help facilitate instruction and provide distant learners with a host of resources and access to content providers, teachers, industry leaders and more.
Generating & Analyzing Data Through Collaboration - Cincinnati Public
Students at Hughes STEM High School will use quantified data generated by their peers to increase their understanding of foundation knowledge and skills in all core classes. These students arrived as new freshman from 49 different feeder schools. Teamwork and collaboration skills will be developed as students learn team roles, effective group interaction, and view and analyze this data to support their content learning. Students will increase individual class/lab participation through the use of an electronic responder system, where students can actively answer a lab question or give feedback, and all students can instantly see and analyze the aggregate responses. Teachers will use the data to develop effective content-related questioning and as a formative assessment to test understanding of concepts and processes. Data will be tabulated to test for student comprehension, using the responders to alleviate the fear of failure that can prevent full participation.
Senior to Senior – Winton Woods City Schools
Winton Woods City Schools is pleased to celebrate its diversity by honoring one another's lives through sharing life stories via video and podcast recordings. Modeled after the National Public Radio's StoryCorps, we will be starting the conversation of a lifetime and passing it on to current and future generations.
Musicophilia: Designing, Building, Composing, and Playing Cigar Box Guitars – Mercy High School
Our engineering students in conjunction with the University of Cincinnati will be designing, building, composing and playing electric cigar box guitars. This project is aligned with the National Content Standards for K-12 Engineering and Technology Standards provided by the American Society of Engineering Education. The students will compose and perform songs for the student body at our Awards Assembly held in May. We will also produce a video of our work and make this available on YouTube.