ITTIP November 2014

1

Halifax County Chamber of

Commerce: Business After Hours Up-Coming Events

Page 1 Business After Hours

Page 2 Open VA

Page 3 PI STEM

Page 3 ISTE Webinar

November 2014 ITTIP Monthly Newsletter

Monthly Megabite

The Halifax County Chamber of Commerce* is promoting attendance to the No-

vember 13th, Business After Hours event, hosted by the Institute for Teaching

Through Technology and Innova-

tive Practices (ITTIP) and Halifax

Industrial Development Authority

(IDA). The event will be held at

the Southern Virginia Technology

Park, Building 1 (1100 Confroy

Drive, South Boston, VA) from

5:30pm - 7:00pm and is expected

to attract local businesses and

Halifax community.

ITTIP’s staff will be eagerly sharing STEM learning tools, including Google Glass,

MakeyMakey, 3Doodlers, and more. In addition, attendees will get a chance to

win a number of door prizes. Don’t miss your chance to attend!

If you are interested in attending this free event for food, drinks, socializing, and

learning, please RSVP by November 7th:

434-572-3085 or [email protected]

*The Halifax Chamber of Commerce is a business advocacy organization that

strives to make Halifax a great place to live, work and play.

Nov 17th STEM Learning Webinar,

Part II

Nov 6th STEM Learning Webinar,

Part I

Nov 11th ACSEL (Secondary Teach-

ers), Nottoway High School

Nov 14th ACSEL (Elementary Teach-

ers ), Crewe Primary School

Nov 13th Business After Hours, South-

ern Virginia Technology

Park

Nov 26-

28th

What to find in this month’s Megabite:

Longwood Closed

Nov 19th SVRTC Meeting, Nottoway

High School

2

ITTIP takes Technology

Around the World

Hopscotch

ITTIP Monthly Newsletter November 2014

Open VA is a one-day event organized to bring together educators, administrators, technologists and policy makers from around Virginia to learn and discuss how higher education institutions can work to-gether to effectively share educational infrastructure, resources, and pedagogy. This year’s event took place on October 18th, at the Tide-water Community College (TWCC) in Virginia Beach.

ITTIP’s director and STEM Learning Specialists attended the event to learn about what other community colleges and universities are do-ing to support “open” resources. This year’s event consisted of three panels and topics throughout the day: Open Educational Resources, Open Infrastructure, and Open Pedagogy/Curriculum Dr. Talaiver facilitated the open pedagogy panel where UMW, VCU, TWCC, and VSU shared best practices.

If you would like to learn more about Open VA, or watch the record-ed events, please visit: openva.org or openva.org/live

OPEN VA Conference:

Open Content, Infrastruc-

ture & Curriculum

Are you interested in finding a way to get young students critically thinking and problem solving? Hopscotch is a free iPad application that gets users excited about computer science and coding through computational thinking and finding general-ized solutions to complex problems. You can create games, animations, stories, and other interactive activities. The visual block like programming interface is similar to that of Scratch, Alice, or Blockly. You can even program and use the iPad to react to shaking, tilting, or shouting to control your creations. Although you can not yet create your own characters, they provide you will some interesting characters to choose from, as well as a way to add emojis to current characters to individu-alize their appearances.

Currently, you can download the application from iTunes for free. However, the designers do have future plans for some in app purchases later down the road. They also have some great tutorial and project videos on line to help you get started, as well as a full curriculum for teachers interested in teaching with this tool. The curriculum is broken down into 45 minute flexible sessions and include presentations. You will have to sign up at the bottom of the Parents & Educations page for ac-cess to these resources.

Above: Open VA participants used the hashtag, #openva on Twitter, to recap the day’s events.

3

November 2014 ITTIP Monthly Newsletter

Hummingbird Robotics at Pittsylvania's

STEM Academy ITTIP’s STEM Learning Specialist, Stephanie Playton, traveled to Pittsyvania’s County Public Schools STEM Academy during the month of October. This is a new facility that opened at the beginning of the school year. As part of the staff’s training, they attended ITTIP’s professional development workshop , Problem-based Interdisciplinary STEM Learning (PI STEM), over the summer. An incentive for their participation included Hummingbird Robotics kits to integrate into their two and a half hour sessions with students visiting the STEM Academy.

During the visit from ITTIP, the STEM Academy instructed over fifty 7th grade students to learn about using the Hummingbird Robotics kit to design and make a 3D interactive model to help other 7th grade students learn about animal and plant cells. The students worked in groups of three or four, and were able to successfully program a servo motor and/or light(s) to interact with their model.

The students were anxious to share their successes in programming a non traditional robot, and vocalized their interests in learning about cre-ating more with the sensors and other components of the kits during their next visit.

Left: Students work together to program their servos and lights as part of their animated diagram.

Above: Participant uses a temperature probe during an online activity.

The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) is hosting the ISTE STEM Webinar Pass through the month of December. As part of the webinar series, ITTIP staff presented and/or facilitated three of the webinars this Fall. The most recent webinar, Global STEMprenuers, attracted over 100 participants internationally. In addition to its diversity in participation location, this webinar includ-ed a panel of teenage scientists, inventors and designers from Chesterfield County , Hawaii , Malaysia and India.

Dr. Manorama Talaiver, director at the Institute for Teaching Through Technology and Innovative Practices (ITTIP), facilitated the pan-elists in talking about their passions, innovations, and entrepreneurships through an interactive webinar. The purpose of the webinar was to help other educators understand what kinds of things inspired these young learners to be global risk takers and to learn and share strategies for motivating other students.

ITTIP Facilitates Webinar:

Global STEMprenuers

Right: Students demonstrate their interactive plant cell to help others remember the parts.