AACPS OIT Byte

By Tracey Brown, Teacher Specialist, Office of Instructional Technology Self-paced courses are designed to be flexible to your availability. Rather than signing up to attend a live session that requires you to account for travel time to and from the course site, or give up valuable hours on a weekend, you can engage with the content any time that fits in with your schedule, including before school, during lunch, after school, or even while traveling if you are connected. The other great thing about self-paced courses is you can work entirely at your own pace. Just because someone else decided the content can be completed in two hours, if you can work through it faster because you are already familiar with some concepts, or need more time to review the content multiple times, or practice with the features, it is entirely up to you as you are in the driver’s seat. Finally, self-paced courses can actually give you more access to an instructor than in person courses because you aren’t vyin...

  By Tracey Brown, Teacher Specialist, Office of Instructional Technology Over the last fews years teacher obligations seem to have increased more and more. In an effort to continue to provide excellent professional development to all instructional staff, we have increasingly moved offerings into a self-paced format in an effort to allow just-in-time learning that fits anyone’s busy schedule. We know not everyone learns well in a self-paced format, and that is why we continue to offer live sessions at schools throughout the day and during faculty meetings, and to offer them in the evenings in a remote format with the hopes of returning to in-person soon, but there are steps you can take to make a self-paced course work better for any learner. Chunk it When schedules get busy, we sometimes adopt the mindset, “I just need to get this done so I can move on to the next task.” Working through a self-paced course with the sole goal of getting it done is a recipe for frustration. If a cou...

By Melissa Connelly, Behavior Specialist & Brightspace Campus Champion at Belle Grove Elementary, and Stacy Langhirt, 1st grade teacher and former eCoach, Severna Park Elementary Books clubs about technology, really? Yes! It was an awesome experience. When asked to facilitate a class during the summer of 2021, feeling a little burned out on technology we asked if we could try something new. Guess what the answer was a  resounding, YES. That is how a five week technology book study came to be using our new LMS, Brightspace. Facilitating a book study about tools and technology that we have available to us everyday and that our students are familiar with just made so much sense. We were able to share a wonderful text, Eric Curts' Control Alt Achieve: Rebooting your Classroom with Creative Google Projects ,  that was rich with ideas on using Google Workspace for Education in the classroom and we had conversations centered around those ideas that helped all of us to grow as e...

By Patrick Malone, Teacher Specialist; Online Campus  Over the last 5 years, AACPS has grown a program in the High Schools that is now offered at virtually every location. How did this program come to be? The Digital Learning Center is a space within a school where all students taking a course online can come and learn with comfort and available support. A learning coach is available during the period to answer questions, provide motivation, technical support, or even help connect students with content specialists. It is literally a one stop shop for any online learner’s needs. The idea for this space came about after an administrator at North County High was concerned about online students not getting effective support in the media center or having a constructive space for their studies. These concerns lead the Office of Instructional Technology to consider alternative options. A visit to a school system in Tennessee would provide the inspiration AACPS would need. Kingsport...

By Kerri Lambert, OIT Teacher Specialist (Before selecting any links below, make sure you have opened Discovery Education from Classlink first) AACPS students and staff have had access to Discovery Education for over twenty years; in fact, a few of you out there may still refer to it as United Streaming! While the service is best known for its videos, Discovery has over 200,000 resources including images, podcasts, audio clips, virtual field trips, and interactives. This past summer, Discovery expanded their offerings even more, launching over 2,100 ready to use student learning activities that leverage the rich multimedia resources found within the platform. Like to create your own? You’re in luck. Discovery also added activity templates based on their popular SOS Instructional Strategies to Studio; teachers simply add their DE resources and within minutes have a high-quality lesson ready to roll. Let’s take a closer look at each of these options. Ready Made Student Learning Activiti...

   Link Don’t Embed! By Tracey Brown, Teacher Specialist, Office of Instructional Technology You may have heard the specialists in OIT say you should link resources shared with students through Brightspace instead of embedding. And maybe you are thinking, WHY? When I embed it looks so clean and pretty. Not to mention linked files keep opening in a new tab and my students get lost with 30 tabs open and they can’t find anything. Embedding does look pretty ON YOUR SCREEN… on the students’ Chromebook it causes multiple problems! The content is often too small to see or display properly. Depending on the type of file, a scroll bar appears along the bottom and the side for students to scroll both horizontally and vertically in an effort to see the whole file. When it is something like Google Slides they can’t even see an entire slide without scrolling. Embedding files can affect accessibility features that many of our students rely on. If it is a Google Slides file and they try to u...

By Dan Fitzgerald, eCoach and STEM Teacher @ North Glen Elementary School Hello everyone! My name is Daniel Fitzgerald, and I'm the STEM Teacher and E-Coach at North Glen Elementary School. Over the past two years, we've been using WeVideo as a tool to build our morning announcements from a brief, over-the-loudspeaker statement, to a full production with students, staff, and community members getting involved, and our student engagement and excitement has never been higher! I'm someone who loves making videos for our students and staff, and I've always tried to use that in my teaching and position at the school. I've found that editing software can often be overwhelming, and people who are new to the idea can be turned away by some of the more complex programs out there. Luckily, WeVideo has been so welcoming to teach and jump in on, giving both students and teachers an easy entry point to video creation and editing, yet with deeper opportunities to grow your skills...