November Learning: Expanding the Boundaries of Learning

Services

• Workshops & Keynotes
• NL Review
• NL Mini-Conferences
• NL ProNet
• Partial Client List

More About NL ProNet

ProNet is our newest job embedded staff development program. The program includes face-to-face meetings, team support, help desk support and a yearlong series of Web based seminars. The goal of ProNet is to integrate 21st century skills across the curriculum and to provide educators with tools for building their own professional learning community. Major themes include:

• Applying Web literacy across the curriculum
• Building the collaborative classroom
• Creating authentic work for a global audience
• Building professional learning communities

Program Description
ProNet can be customized in a variety of ways. If you are a single school, it is possible to combine your school’s team with other single schools for an event that begins and ends with a visit to our BLC summer conference. Or, if several schools within your district or region are interested, we can bring the two face-to-face meetings to you. Either way, the opening meeting will be followed by six online seminars. All participants will join an online professional community where forums, shared files, professional development videos, podcasts and online chats will support your ongoing work. Each member of your team will have a seat in all of our six online webcasts. Choose to broadcast one of your seats in an auditorium setting, and you can have an unlimited number of colleagues in your school or district participate in the webcasts. We will also provide five hours of one-to-one consulting per team for personalized support and a subscription for each member to join our online Web literacy courses.

About the Program Participants
Each participating school will organize a team consisting of five team members. One of the team members will serve as a team captain. This team will be matched up with teams from seven to nine other schools to create up to a fifty-person cohort. Your cohort will participate in this program over the course of a school year. The work of each participant in the cohort will contribute to the benefit of the whole. Team captains will have additional conference calls with a November Learning facilitator to provide continuous feedback and to receive additional training.

About the November Learning Facilitators
Each team will be matched up with a facilitator from November Learning. November Learning facilitators are experienced educators and are all well versed in curriculum and technology. The role of these facilitators is to serve as your guide for the entire year. They will lead the cohort sessions, will serve as support for individual teams and team members and will work closely with each team captain to assure that all site concerns are addressed and successes shared.

Face-to-Face Meetings
The program begins when all or part of each school team comes together in person for a face-to-face orientation meeting. This meeting will allow you to meet other cohort members as well as members of the November Learning team who will be guiding you throughout the year. We will lead a discussion to learn about your curriculum issues. Our goal is to learn more about your curriculum and areas of focus. Emphasis will be on web literacy, building learning communities and designing more rigorous and motivating assignments.

There will be a second face-to-face meeting following the six Web events to report on successes and to discuss next steps for continuing along this new path of teaching and learning. Individual cohort members and teams will share success stories through various presentations.

Live Web Events
Between to two face-to-face meetings, there will be six live Web events scheduled throughout the school year that all participants must attend. Each one-hour event will cover a specific topic and will be integrated with the points of emphasis that teachers shared during the orientation meeting. In addition, each Web event will be supplemented with an assignment to complete. You will be encouraged to share and discuss your work with your cohort members through a Web based tool. Throughout all of our sessions, there will be an emphasis on assessment, classroom management, alignment to curriculum, ethics and safety. Our November Learning facilitators will also be available to answer your questions along the way. The six Web events will include:

• Session 1 – Web Literacy I: Understanding the Grammar of the Internet – In today’s information society, students are turning to the Internet for most of their classroom research. However, many sites that look valuable are really publishing faulty information or a narrow perspective. This session highlights techniques that will help reduce plagiarism and increase creativity through effective research. To supplement the information from this session, all participants will get free access to our online courses entitled Teaching Zack to Think: Webliteracy for Educators.

• Session 2 – Web Literacy II: Building Tools for Information Gathering – Integration across the curriculum is key to developing information literacy skills. Teachers can provide opportunities for students to put what they have learned to work by guiding them through the building of customized search engines and information aggregators. These tools provide students with 24/7 access to rich resources and targeted information. Managing information is a building block for life-long learning.

• Session 3 – Collaborative Classroom I: Developing a Curriculum Design Team – Collaborative classrooms provide opportunity for the work of everyone to contribute for the benefit of the whole class. A first step might be to implement a scribe program where official note takers create a collaborative set of online notes for whole class use. An additional step is to have students develop a library of screencasts that supplement classroom instruction. These two jobs together create core material that builds a foundation for student learning. All students are contributors.

• Session 4 – Collaborative Classroom II: Developing a Curriculum Design Team (continued) – This session will continue to cover collaborative tools that creates content and benefits the learning of all students. Examples include developing Google Maps, Voicethreads, podcasts and more.

• Session 5 – Globalizing the Classroom – It is essential that our students learn to work with people all over the world. This session will focus on creating learning partnerships across the curriculum. Examples include using communication tools such as Skype to create podcasts.

• Session 6 – Building Professional Communities for Educators – An emerging opportunity for professional development is that every teacher has a professional development network that fosters ongoing learning. This session will introduce a variety of tools such as Twitter and Ning that will develop a savvy networked educator.

If you have any questions about ProNet, call Alan November at 781-631-4333 to discuss the program. Register a team for ProNet by contacting Donna Lang at 781-631-4333.