The “Developing Leaders – Redefining Mobile Learning: making Thinking Visible” iTunes U course allows educators to learn about new teaching methods that increase student comprehension by making thinking visible. The collection outlines how to understand what visible thinking is, how to document learning, how to redefine document learning, explore the role of instructional coaching, redefine formative assessment, and creatively adapt learning environments by exploring perspectives. There are thirty courses in the collection including: Explain Everything Interactive Whiteboard, Portrait of the Reader: Growth Through Portfolio Development, and Reaching All Learning: Utilizing Student Interests to Empower Accessibility. To access this collection go to you iTunes U app and click the educators button under learning resources. Then click See All to view the full 30 courses under Inspiring Lesson Ideas. To reach the Making Thinking Visible click this link. The lesson that includes Portrait of the Reader: Growth Through Portfolio Development in included under the Redefining Formative Assessment section of the course. The ibook Portrait of a Reader: Growth Through Portfolio Development is written by an Apple Distinguished Educator, Janel McCormick. McCormick discusses how the use of a portfolio can document student progression and improve metacognition. She discusses how to use apps like MoodBoard, Dropbox, and Explain Everything to turn a yearlong portfolio assignment from a daunting task to easy to use student project. This idea strongly correlates with the idea of creating visible thinking. McCormick’s electronic portfolios allow students to see how they have developed into stronger readers and writers over the span of a year. The instructors of the Developing Leaders – Redefining Mobile Learning: Making Thinking Visible, Caroline Haebig and Mark Shillitoe, “explore how to improve student teacher workflow and engagement with technology”. Within the course, teaching strategies that promote deeper inquiry are presented. One such strategy is the Think Puzzle Explore routine. This strategy poses three questions to students before the start of a topic. By asking students What do you think you know about this topic?, What questions or puzzles do you have? And How can you explore this topic? it allows students to connect prior knowledge, stimulate curiosity, and to lay the groundwork for independent inquiry. Another strategy that was introduced is the routine for distilling the essence of ideas nonverbally. This allows students to use CSI or a color, symbol, or image to represent the essence of an idea. While these examples were given in the context of an English language classroom, the ideas can be edited to the content area of agriculture. New teaching strategies can be used by any educator regardless of the content area to increase student comprehension and enrich the learning classroom. CSI can be used as a heuristic to help students remember each organ within the digestive system of a ruminant. For example students may use the image of a honeycomb to non-verbally condense the function of the reticulum. Think, Puzzle, Explore could be used to introduce new topics before the lesson to document what misconceptions students have or areas of weakness as well as areas of interest that could be elaborated on. An electronic portfolio could also be used within the agriculture classroom to document student growth and promote metacognition. Portfolios could include landscape design projects to demonstrate how students have progressed in the application of their knowledge. The possibilities are endless in regards to using visible thinking with the agriculture classroom and so I would highly recommend educators taking the course Making Thinking Visible to learn new ways to reach their students.

The One Best Thing iBook Digital leaders: Transforming Learning with Students in the Lead is written by Apple Distinguished Educator, Mark Anderson. Anderson discusses the advantages of creating a digital leaders program at a high school and how to go about doing so. First Anderson discusses the need for educators to go beyond the survival stage of technology use and move into the innovative stage. Anderson describes the survival stage when he writes, “At this level, educators are scared of breaking equipment, unsure of what to do with it, how to use it and what relevance it has to education”. Subsequently he describes innovation when he writes, “At this level, educators are fully digitally literate and have a sound understanding of pedagogy such as SAMR and RPACK, and how to successfully integrate technology into their learning pathways. They also share this knowledge and are likely to innovate in their schools and share these innovations using social media”. For students to become digital leaders, first educators must be able to integrate technology into the classroom for learning purposes. However, Anderson also created a way for student digital learners to help teachers master classroom technology. Digital leaders must complete so many tasks within the school to retain their position. Some of these potential tasks can be supporting teachers in their application of technology and guiding them in their employment of apps. However, Anderson says that the key to creating a successful digital leader program is allowing students to base their roles off of their interests and abilities. Other students can screencast how to use an app or write an article. Anderson also expresses the importance of stressing that digital leaders system should not be viewed as a club or as a club for geeks. He has implemented an application process for students to join the system. First students must create an application in “an innovative way using technology” and afterwards they are interviewed based on the quality of their application. By using an application system and having the leaders sign a contract; it holds the students to a high level of expectations as well as making the system prestigious and respected. This iBook by Mark Anderson presents a unique way for teachers to create a digital leader program. He includes personal examples and apps that can be used for the program. I believe that a digital leader program will help build students to use technology in the classroom to learn, improve the lives of others by promoting important causes, empowering others with no voices, and simply by being a positive influence. A digital leader program can be used within the agriculture classroom to create better advocates for the industry as well as fostering learning. I would highly recommend this iBook to teachers exploring the concept of digital leaders.

The Edutopia blog post “Teaching Grit: How to Help Students Overcome Inner Obstacles”, written by Vicki Zakrzewski, helps educators understand what teaching grit consists of. The post explains that grit is a characteristic that is beginning to be taught in classrooms because it has been proven to create students who attain higher levels of education, higher GPAs, and are more likely to graduate from high school. Educators must teach that self-perception matters when it comes to instilling grit. The old quote from Henry Ford goes, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t. You’re right”. Teaching optimism helps promote a positive self-perception by changing how we view the setbacks that we encounter. Students must be able to work through difficult emotions instead of suppressing them because suppression can lead to increased negative emotions and anxiety. Not only with optimism promote positive self-perception, but it will also build resilience. In turn, resiliency will allow students to learn from their mistakes and succeed in long term goals. So how can educators teach grit? Modeling gritty behavior allows students to learn from the adults in their lives. Educators can also help students create goals to apply grit to. Beth Perkins discussed the implementation of grit into her curricula when she said “Where am I gonna fit it in, in my otherwise very busy day? But what it turned out is you’re doing it already. Every time you teach children the process of writing and generating ideas and sticking with writing over a long period of time and revising, that’s teaching them the skills that they need to have grit”. As educators we need to instill skills that will allow students to be successful in not only higher education, but also the workforce. By helping students create long term goals and stick to them we will create hard work ethics, determination, and resiliency within our students. Stay gritty everyone.