Putting my summer work into practice with HyperDocs and more

This summer felt like a whirlwind of teacher trainings and workshops.  We met, connected and reconnected with so many educators that are eager to transform their teaching this year.  It was an exciting summer to say the least. 

One part of my summer included participating in the MasterClass tour from

EdTechTeam.  I attended the NYC tour with a team from my school that was organized by my husband, Brian Cauthers.  As a team, we learned so much from the authors that guided us through a tech journey throughout the day.  We were fortunate that our tour included a booksmash that included Dive Into Inquiry, HyperDocs Handbook and Google Infused Classroom.  I had read all three books prior to attending and loved them all.  The authors that joined us were so approachable and helpful throughout the day, providing insight on ways to incorporate technology meaningfully into our classes.  

It was great to see how the room varied from newcomers to tech integration to leaders, such as our friend, Laurie Guyon.  Everyone shared and helped out to create lessons that we could bring back and implement this year, which is priceless!  

One of my favorite things that I created this summer with my assistant superintendent, Dr. Adam Pease, is a HyperDoc for our mandated training that we do in school every year.  (Yes, I'm lucky to have an administrator that is not only supportive, but also innovative and constantly learning new things with us.)  I'm not sure how your school does it, but our mandated training on blood borne pathogens, child abuse reporting and the others is just painful.  We watch videos that appear to have been created in the 1970s and just click through each step until we have to take a quiz at the end.  Once we complete all of them, we print our certificate to prove completion and it's over.  Boring.  This year will be different.  Our teachers will have a choice!  This has been a recurring theme in our district since last year - giving students and teachers voice and choice.  As a result of our concerted effort, we came up with a HyperDoc that does just that.  Gives teachers a choice.  They can do the same old boring version or the new spruced up version! 

Here's a preview of what it looks like (click here for a larger view)

The new version serves two purposes: 

1.  Get staff to think critically about the content while making their learning visual.
2. Help the staff to use technology tools that they can also implement in their classrooms this year.  

It seems like this should have been done long ago.  With the HyperDoc format, it is all packaged in one clean slide for all six topics.  Teachers will experience:

• posting in a shared document
• creating a slide in a shared slide deck
• posting a video on Flipgrid
• answering questions in a google form with embedded videos
• posting responses in a shared Padlet
• completing questions about a video using EdPuzzle

In addition to simply completing our training requirement, the administrators and clinical staff will now have responses from teachers that they can use for future discussions and training throughout the school year.  

So far, we have tested our HyperDoc with our administrators and our tech leaders with amazing feedback. We have tweaked it slightly based on their feedback and cannot wait to roll it out with the full staff next week.  One simple thing we learned so far is that even though we have done the training every year, most of our testers did not know who the Title 1 officers were in the district.  We have never received feedback like that from our previous format.  Once it is complete, I'll post again with some feedback on how it was received by the staff.  Wish us luck!

Thanks for learning with us!

--Jen