Michael Hakkarinen and Jared Ward - The CSD
Black Diamond Challenge
Michael Hakkarinen: Before we get into our
concept or topic here, the Black Diamond Challenge,
I just want to invite you all to follow us
on Twitter, I am there as EdTecHakk and you
will find Jared as Wardjhs.
Jared Ward: There is a d there.
Michael Hakkarinen: Yeah, there is a d there,
who made this?
Jared Ward: I don't know.
Michael Hakkarinen: Fired.
Jared Ward: Might have been you.
Michael Hakkarinen: Probably me. So EdTec
as an education technology specialist, I am
in new to Canyons, just got here a year ago
from Maryland and Jared has been here since
the start and Canvas is also something that’s
new to the Canyons School District and we
would like to share with you about how we
got the people that are using it excited and
motivated and involved with our product. So
I know you have probably heard a lot of presentations
about tools that go with Canvas and some of
the tips and tricks, we want to talk mostly
about people and how to get people using it.
Jared Ward: And so the people that we were
working with are teachers and students and
our public in our K12 school district, we
are pretty large district, we actually just
split, there was some controversy, those of
you from Utah might remember but we still
have about 33000 students, about 1600 teachers,
we have last year about 16000 active Canvas
users, does that sound, right, Robert?
Robert: Yeah.
Jared Ward: Our initial trainings as we got
started with Canvas, we knew we wouldn’t
be able to train the whole district all at
once, it's just too big a group and we are
a team of about 20, so we started with a pilot
group of about 20 teachers about 2 years ago
now, that pilot group of about 20 teachers
is now our Canvas evangelists in our schools
and they have been great to train other teachers
and work with our – the other faculty on
their staff but at the beginning of last school
year we also started working with all of our
language arts teachers, all of our science
and all of our world languages teachers, so
we added those groups, those 250 teachers,
did specific trainings and they came for 1
or 2 days of training throughout the school
year, but our core group of 20 had 8 sessions
of full day training where we talked about
blended learning with Canvas, blended learning
instructional design as well as Canvas integration.
So as we got started with that group of 20
we really, really wanted to focus on not just
what Canvas can do but what blended learning
instruction looks like. What we don’t want
to happen is have a teacher sit up at the
front of the classroom and say “The information
for today’s lesson is all in Canvas, the
chrome books are there, go pick them up, if
you have any questions I will be here come
ask me” We don’t want that to happen,
we don’t want poor instruction to seep into
our classrooms because of the technology that
we are bringing to them. So we have started
to really focus more and in the coming years
we are going to talk a lot with our teachers
about blended learning instructional design
and make sure that they really understand
what adding a technology piece like Canvas
looks like, in their classroom.
Michael Hakkarinen: All right, so you probably
heard those stories about professional development
or great ideas that happened in the hallway
sand if I could call this a great idea, I
would say that this did happen right in the
hallway, Jared, Rachel and I were kind of
crossing paths and we were talking about how
do we get teachers motivated to use Canvas
and try new things and being a ski bum and
dragging my family across the country to ski
here, I immediately thought of how ski resorts
denote their runs for beginners, intermediate,
and expert skiers and everybody loves badges,
if you doubt that look at your lanyards. So
we were thinking of ways to give teachers
these badges as they achieve these different
levels. So you know you think about a first
time user gets the green level and then as
they become more advanced they get a blue
square and then a black diamond. And then
when I talked about this I realized what an
opportunity to make a ski movie which is my
favorite thing to do, so we would like to
share with you even though Rachel is not here,
we will share with her movie as she introduces
the Black Diamond challenge.
Rachel Murphy: Hi, we are excited to introduce
to you the Canvas Black Diamond challenge,
a program inspired after the way ski resorts
classified their trials. The Green level is
for those teachers just getting started with
Canvas, learn the fundamentals and match your
classroom to the Canyons Canvas style. Once
teachers are comfortable with the fundamentals
of Canvas they will move on to the blue square
challenges and receive the blue square swag
bag. Teachers who reach the blue square level
are beginning to use Canvas for assignments
and discussions and are posting course content
for students to access them out of school.
Black Diamond Canvas Challenge isn’t a race,
take your time to learn each skill so that you can
become an effective blended classroom teacher.
Once you have received your blue square swag
bag, it's time to move beyond the blues and
to challenge yourself with the advanced features
of Canvas. Moving up from a blue square to
a black diamond means that you are starting
to use Canvas regularly in a classroom for
assignments and discussions and you are starting
to experiment with peer collaborations, and
using CSD docs for group projects. Sometimes
you don’t have the luxury of a trail map
to help you get where you are going, reach
out to your Ed tech for times when you need
more help.
Jared Ward: Michael made the whole video,
looks pretty nice and I do want to make sure
that we introduce Rachel Murphy, she had a
family engagement in Las Vegas and I feel
really bad for her and she had to be with
her family and so we want to excuse her but
she has been an integral part in building
this, so Rachel Murphy again is a big part
of our team and has really helped build what
this has become, and as we looked at what
Canvas could do, it's a pretty lengthy list
of all the things that Canvas can do and this
isn’t even a complete list but these are
the things that immediately stood out to us,
these are the things could be beneficial for
teachers in our classrooms and to students
in their own learning and we wanted to whittle
that list down so that there was something
more manageable and this is kind of what we
came up with, the things that are marked in
green where again the beginning level kind
of building your course, building Canvas as
a class website, then we evolved to the blue
items and that’s where a teacher is sending
out assignments maybe announcements, calendar
events, communicating directly with the students
and the students are also beginning to communicate
with the teacher. They are submitting assignments
maybe engaging in discussions or comments
about a certain assignment, so we whittled
some of the things down, that we knew we couldn’t
use in our classrooms, maybe weren't relevant
in K12, we also took some things out, that
we knew we would want to focus on later, that
we weren't quite ready for to teach and we
are still learning Canvas as well as we built
this.
So this is the kind of list that what we needed
and this is how it turned into the Canvas
challenge, became a check list for teachers
so that they could kind of self assess and
check off the things that they needed in their
classes and all of this is on our website,
it's all on our – we have what we call the
Canvas Fast track that a self guided training
course as well as the foundation for all the
trainings that we do in Canvas, so evolving
especially over the summer is Canvas makes
changes but you are welcome to access any
of those things. We will talk more about that
in a minute but each of these levels will
go through them individually, get a little
closer shots so you can see them a little
bit better, but at the different levels they
have tasks to check off and again what's important
for us to communicate I think is that this
isn’t a tiered level of expertise with Canvas.
Some of our teachers, I would say most of
our teachers when they work with Canvas they
are going to live at a blue level and we are
all okay with that, they are sharing assignment,
they are engaging students, they might be
adding discussions or some of the black diamond
level elements or what it is for us is it's
a scaffolded experience for our training so
that teachers can select the things that really
work for them and move on at a pace or a methodology,
pedagogy that works for them.
Michael Hakkarinen: So as we mentioned in
the video, in order for people to grow we
have to step out of our comfort zone and that
can be a very scary thing for anybody but
especially for teachers when you are standing
in front of 30 students and you are trying
some technology that you might fumble with
but they are better using than you are, so
by scaffolding we can create some basic skills
and then build on them from there, so here
is how it works, when we first get started
with teachers we might have them in, it could
be an hour long training in their school or
maybe in their department, it might be an
hour long training after school with their
Ed tech, might be an all day training if they
are part of our cohort, and then we also have
the Canvas fast track which we are going to
invite you to and it is a completely open
Canvas course, we will give you the invite
URL and you can join it and you are free to
use it, build on it, steal from it, say it's
yours, don’t do that.
So here is how we basically get started, we
got them in the class, we got them in the
fast track and we give them these badge folders
that they can then put in their classroom
and put stickers on and achieve different
levels, to get more in depth let’s look
at the green level first, this is your beginner
and how we use Canvas in your classroom kind
of parallels how you use the internet in your
classroom. Some teachers use it as just a
mechanism for delivering information, having
a website up there with the same thing over
here, here is my name, here is my number,
here is my email. So we have them start a
basic Canvas course set up and that's easy
for them if they are in the fast track because
they are seeing how Canvas is used from a
perspective of a student first, they begin
to understand how Canvas works when we expect
them to use Canvas as a website like I said
a static website for of courses basic information
and have people be able to contact them and
maybe post some resources students will need.
Now the blue level, the more intermediate
user is going to start with some actual communication
now, this isn’t static anymore, this is
now a dynamic page, they are utilizing more of
the features for assessment and instruction,
we will start to see organizing content into
things like modules and may be even pages,
and then we are also going to see some communication
and feedback start to occur between the teachers
and the students, so the assignments are given
out, they are collected and then we have that
feedback building, so now we have got real
collaboration. To take this to the next level,
we provide students with an opportunity to
collaborate with each other, so now you are
still building on that green level, you have
got your static page with your information,
you are also using the blue level skills,
you are doing assignments, calendaring, etc.,
but we take it a step further and we start
to utilize discussions, group projects, peer
reviews, so now you have got cloud communication,
cloud collaboration that’s happening online
not just between the teacher and the students
but between the students themselves, this
is where we start to get into that blended
learning environment.
Jared Ward: So now we got a plan in place,
we got a program that we want to enroll teachers
in, we got our training course in the Canvas
fast track, how do we get teachers excited
about Canvas, and so I want to go back to
that how it works slide and talk about this,
this is the badge holder that we give to all
of our teachers, we pass these out at the
beginning of a training or we deliver them
to our teachers in schools individually and
we put these up with the hopes that they get
placed in the window of every classroom in
our schools and the teachers say they move
through Canvas they put their badge, and we
will show you those here in a minute, they
put their badge on a badge holder, it's a
sticker but badge sounds fancier. We put the
badge on and then teachers know who they can
turn to for help because we are not always
there, I work in two large high schools, I
have about 200 teachers that I work with total
and about 4000 students in each of those schools,
so I can t be there all the time and I can't
be there to support them every minute that
they need, so teachers have built in supports
in the school, but students we are hoping
will also start to understand, we are about
a year into this but students will begin to
understand the level of Canvas use that they
can expect from the teacher as they walk into
class, and we are again still training and
still building and still helping people understand
what this is about as we get further along
with Canvas we get more and more emails and
request for these badge holders in classroom,
we think that's a pretty good sign.
Michael Hakkarinen: Don’t forget if you
are a green level user and you have got a
teammate down the hall who has a blue square
or black diamond then you can go there and
get some help
Jared Ward: So I want to talk to about what
the Canvas challenge became. Michael mentioned
that at the green level you get a badge, at
the blue level you get a bag of prizes. That
was also in the video I guess with Rachel
talking about it and then at the black level
we gave grants and this is a budgeted item
from our district but we gave teachers $100
and $500 and $1000 grants, the list of things
they could purchase were given to them, they
could also purchase something else that they
thought they would like to buy. We typically
gave iPads out in sets of five, chrome books
out in sets of five and this is kind of what
we have given out so far this year, I think
I might have guessed a little low on some
of these, as I was putting these together
but that’s about where we are as far as
the grants that we have given out to teachers
in to integrate more technology into their
classroom. The number of teachers who participated
again we trained about 20-25 initial teachers,
we worked with about 250 throughout the district
and this is our total acceptance implementation
group, about 80 teachers applied for green
level, 41 at blue and 26 at black diamond
and we think that's pretty good, we have about
125 pretty active Canvas users who are participating
in this black diamond challenge and few more
than that maybe up to about 200 who are using
Canvas at some level or another, we just kind
of don’t know about them, so as we move
to the next couple of years we are kind of
thinking and planning how we can make this
bigger and better. One of the things that
we initially saw was that some of the teachers
who got to black diamond level only just barely
got there and maybe kind of faked it to get
there and we got them gray, don’t tell them,
but this isn’t going online, right?
Michael Hakkarinen: Just YouTube.
Jared Ward: Just YouTube, that's good. So
we kind of call them gray, they weren't really
Black Diamond level but we awarded it to them
anyway and we gave them some recognition and
some extra help to really get them to fully
Black Diamond integration in their classrooms
but one of the things we want to build in
our plans for 2014, we are going to expand
to green level, so it's not just a static
website, we do add more dynamic content materials
to our green level, we are doing a focus training
now instead of 20, we are focusing training
on about 150 teachers. There will be about
4-5 teacher leaders, 9 in our high schools,
at every school so that every location in
our district has somebody they can could go
to to ask questions and get help, we also
have a big Canvas training a kick off at the
beginning of the year, in August, that’s
going to happen, and we are inviting about
500 teachers to that event and the goal is
to get all of our secondary teachers trained
by 2015, so in June 2015, they will walk out
of the building with a Canvas course set up
for all of their classes so in the fall at
least 2015-16 they can walk in copy content
and be ready to go Canvas and kind of understand
how that works for them, and then we are adding
also a double black diamond level, Mike talk
about that.
Michael Hakkarinen: So if you are in black
diamond run and you are through some trees
and cliffs on it, you are double black diamond.
So we need a level now for our black diamond
teachers to aspire to, take it to the next
level and when you make the acronym blended
learning and Canvas K12 black, that will
be the name of our second course that we will
design this year for the users who are ready
to go on to that next double black diamond
level.
Jared Ward: Our expectations are that the
teachers will maintain black diamond level
for a minimum of three months to reach double
black diamond level. We are still building
what this really looks like, the logo is pretty
hot off the presses, we just built this course
about a week ago, the course shell and so
that's our logo, our design for now, it will
probably change. But what we wanted to have
happen at this presentation was for us to
share some ideas with you so you could go
back and build something like this in your
own schools. What I want to talk about now,
when we came to Instructure last year and
we presented on Canvas for mobile, it was
a lot of fun, we had a great time, we have
that presentation. I think it's on YouTube
as well, and we have got a great website you
can go check out there, but we also saw eCornell
and other training shell courses and we really
really wanted to build something that was
on our own, and that's where the Canvas fast
track came from. We got our ideas from here,
we want to share those with you but here is
what we think can help you build this at your
schools. I saw lot of you taking photos of
this slide, I think this is where it all started
for us, we looked at what Canvas was capable
of and we measured the things that were most
important. What do you need Canvas to do at
your institutions. At K12 it's something typically
very different than at a university, so your
list is going to look different than even
though the high school down the road possibly,
so build our own list of the things that are
the most important and then collect them in
groups that makes sense. Again ours was teacher
communication to the student, student to teacher
communication and then student to student
communication and feedback, that’s how we
tried to scale this and the last thing we
want to end on is what we think makes effective
professional development and it took us about
a year to crystallize these ideas but these
are the things we believe about professional
development.
Number 1, you got to provide adequate training,
it's got to be ongoing, just in time, focused,
face to face, online, all of those things
are important. Teachers are very busy and
you got to be able to support them where they
are and when they need it. The next thing
is feed them well. We always brought lunch
to our trainings, we had food and snacks.
Somebody mentioned chocolate, was a great
idea, I think that's a great way to go. The
other idea is to compensate them for their
time, and those fit in we think a little bit
with the swag. We got some examples of our
black diamond swag and we have got time for
questions we will pass some of that out but
that compensation for time happens monetarily
as well as some of the swag that we passed
out and the integration with the training
with the training course. Our training course
is the Canvas fast track, we refer to it all
the time, it's not three courses, it's always
one, there is not an online course, there
is not a face to face course, and just in
time course, it's one course and we reference
it all the time so every teacher knows what
it is and where to find it. If you want to
access it this is kind of the home page and
what it looks like, this is our URL. Canyonsdistrict.org/cavasfasttrack.
We will post this in the discussion as well
as our presentation notes in the discussion
where you can kind of give us feedback and
ask questions there as well. So if you have
any quality ongoing please share them there
in that discussion board or tweet them out
to us.
Michael Hakkarinen: All right, so that course,
is you do credit in our district from the
Utah State Office of Education and it's self
paced so teachers could take all year to complete
that course if they want or they can do it
in a couple of weeks. When we have these teachers
trained, we have them at the black diamond
level, we got our agents of change, we got
our people within the schools who can be the
catalyst and make things happen with Canvas
in their schools and then support the teachers
that are using it. Now I do want to fix something
real quick here and give you guys the opportunity
to ask some questions and what Jared is going
to do and what I could do is we are going
to pass out some of the swag to you guys based
on your questions and how we got started and
how we implemented this, question right there.
Audience: [Indiscernible][00:21:30]
Jared Ward: Our deployment right now–The
question is are we only working with secondary,
the answer, really short answer is yes, right
now our implementation is grade 6 through
12, we do have some of our team that is writing
proposals right now to go through K through
6 so that we can work with our elementaries
as well. So it's coming just hasn’t happened
yet, so you want a stylus or a lanyard or
a clip?
Michael Hakkarinen: Yes, ma'am in the back
in the Canvas sweat shirt, do you have an
iPad.
Audience: [Indiscernible][00:22:00]
Jared Ward: No, it's budgeted from our department,
our education technology director funded about
$20000 for the fast track training and the
swag.
Michael Hakkarinen: Good question, yes, sir,
right here.
Jared Ward: Want stylus, you have an iPad?
Michael Hakkarinen: Go ahead and I will repeat
your question.
Audience: [Indiscernible][00:22:38]
Michael Hakkarinen: The question is have we
ever demoted anybody from blue level back
to green.
Jared Ward: You couldn’t go from black to
green, you can from black to blue and we did
have that happen. We had a teacher who was
at the black level and he applied for black
again for another month and didn't make it.
So we wouldn’t say demoted but he just wasn’t
maintaining that level of use. He wasn’t
regularly using discussion, let’s say .
Audience: [Indiscernible][00:23:15]
Michael Hakkarinen: Do we use Canvas with
or the black diamond challenge? The different
levels, we haven’t used it with other,
Jared Ward: Not yet.
Michael Hakkarinen: – but we are looking
at it that way because we have other things
to implement like Google docs and Google apps
for educators, exactly, another question right
back there.
Audience: [Indiscernible][00:23:32]
Michael Hakkarinen: Yes.
Audience: So you said it's only one class
so what is it, different modules that they
take for the different levels?
Jared Ward: Yes.
Audience: Okay.
Jared Ward: 16 modules, yeah, took a minute
to build. But the modules aren’t necessarily
tied to black diamond ideas, it's how to build
pages, how to use discussions effectively,
how to do peer reviews and other collaborations,
so the how-to are all there and we try to
form – ask it in the form of a question,
how do I – so the teacher reads that question
and answers it themselves and finds the information
they need and it does correlate, yeah.
Michael Hakkarinen: Yes, ma'am in the back.
Audience: We are recording this, so they don’t
hear your questions unless you speak into
the mic, so who –
Audience: I was just wondering, I don’t
see anything about using the outcomes or having
them teach based on standards, are you thinking
about incorporating that maybe you’re your
double black diamond because that's a pretty
cool tool?
Jared Ward: Yes, sorry, I just threw that
at you. We do use outcomes and we do teach
outcomes. There is a requirement that they
grade at least one assignment with a rubric,
we are building district level outcomes, it's
kind of our – the world languages group
is one that I work with specifically and we
focused a lot on outcomes, we built district
level outcomes and then integrated them into
every world language teachers course, the
issue we had with the outcomes was just the
reporting at the district level, comes in
one gigantic CSV file that includes every
outcome in our entire instance of Canvas,
so we have got to figure out a way to export
that, we have been working with Canvas on
a better method of getting that data back
but so far we haven’t seen that yet.
Michael Hakkarinen: Well, our school district
is looking at mastery based grading right
now. Elementary just switched to mastery based
grading and our middle schools are piloting
a couple of different programs and one of
them is Canvas and outcomes, so that could
possibly become our grade book for secondary,
we are not just not sure yet. Yes, sir.
Audience: How do you manage the monitoring
of all this, you only had hundreds of teachers
right now, when it expands to 1600 teachers
what kind of time, you know, commitment is
that for you?
Michael Hakkarinen: Well, the secondary ed techs, there is about what, 6 of us now?
Jared Ward: Nine.
Michael Hakkarinen: Nine secondary Ed techs
and each one of us is responsible for couple
of different modules in the fast track, so
what we can do is individually grade each
person going through the fast track and in
that way we can determine who has completed
that and then in our schools we can go and
work with those teachers and observe them
and say, yeah, you are definitely a blue or
you are definitely a black. We have 20 Ed
techs in the whole school district, so each
of us is able to visit one or two schools
and be able to monitor the teachers, it's
broken up among the team. It's going to explode
since – recording right there.
Jared Ward: We are going to have sleeping
bags in our office and we are just going to
live there, we are looking at recruiting other
help though, we are – I didn't mention this
but we are a team of about 20 education technology
specialists, we are instructional designers
but we are also education technology trainer
but we also have a curriculum department of
I don't know, 40 or so and about 20 real team
leads there. So, we are going to ask for their
help, again this is not the internet here,
right, but we do need help and we will be
recruiting our curriculum department to help
us.
Michael Hakkarinen: Let me just send an email.
Jared Ward: That's the only – you can send
that out, tweet that and then we will begin.
I think we need to kind of wrap up but we
have other questions, come on up, we have
some swag again, this is kind of an example
of our black diamond swag, we have got pins,
lanyards, clips, a nice mug that they get.
Our favorite thing is that the blue level
is the really the big incentive for the blue
level is the stylus pen flashlight combo and
we designed all the logos for these, we work
with the print company to get all these made.
So Canvas was great to help us with the logo
and everything else like that, but we did
all the design and art work and I should say
too Canvas and A&E have been very good about
giving us some of the Canvas swag that they
have got and we have used that in our gift
bags to teachers as well.
Michael Hakkarinen: We also want to wrap up
by promoting our Flip’in Utah conference
which will be on August 12 and 13 at Jordan
High School, you just Google Flip’in Utah
like that and it will take you right to our
page and we can learn more about the presentations
that will be there.
Jared Ward: All about blended learning and
flip classroom instructions, we are kind of
excited about that as well, thank you come
ask questions and tweet us.
Michael Hakkarinen: Thank you very much.
