I’m doing two workshops for the Minnesota Middle School Association in June, one in Moorhead (near Fargo) on June 25 and one in Lakeville (near the Twin Cities) on June 26. Here are the descriptions of our sessions each day:

Designing For Our New Ecosystem (9:00am to 10:30am)
As educators, how can we be more intentional and purposeful about resolving incongruities between in-school learning spaces and out-of-school learning spaces? Out-of-school learning spaces are global; are often crowdsourced; are increasingly open/accessible/free; focus on creation/ participation, not just consumption; are active/interactive; etc. In-school learning spaces, not so much. But they COULD BE (with examples from real classrooms).

How Do We Know If Our Technology Integration Is Any Good? (10:45am to 12:15pm)
It’s often difficult for us as educators to know whether technology usage by students and teachers is productive or just eye candy. This session will begin with a discussion of frameworks that help us think more deeply about effective technology integration. We then will apply those frameworks to multiple video scenarios that allow us to refine our understandings of powerful technology usage and how to better coach teachers.

Deeper Thinking, Technology Infusion, and Student Agency (1:00pm to 2:30pm)
It’s difficult to create lessons that focus on deeper thinking, student agency, and rich technology infusion. In this session we will focus on the challenging task of operationalizing the high expectations we now have of classroom educators. Bring your construction helmet; we’ll be doing complex lesson design work!

As always, the focus of these workshops will be to give participants concrete resources and strategies that they can implement back home in their school systems. I hope that some of you will join us. And, if you can’t, please pass along this opportunity to others!