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Professional Development for Teachers: Bring Kiddom to your school

Professional Development for Teachers: Bring Kiddom to your school

by | Jun 17, 2019 | Principals, Professional Development for Teachers

Aditya Patel

Aditya Patel

Product Success Manager, Kiddom

Passionate about building great products that support excellent teaching and learning practices. Outside of the office, he loves to ski, hike, and wander the streets of a new city in hopes to find a great hole-in-the-wall restaurant.
It’s no secret that teachers are always looking to help each other out. May it be sharing lessons and activities or highlighting some of their best practices, teachers know exactly who they can turn too.

Simply said, when teachers need help they look to their fellow educators for support. So, to help teachers share the value of Kiddom with their colleagues, we’ve built a professional development kit.

 

What’s included in this professional development kit?

Within the kit we have a ton of materials for teachers to use and share so all of their colleagues can get started right away!  

In the kit we have four slide decks that walk teachers through the basics of Kiddom. These presentations will introduce teachers to Kiddom and demonstrate how to use some core features like creating and using rubrics and Kiddom’s Content Library. These decks are straightforward and were created to be easily digestible for teachers.

Also included are additional resources and guides to help teachers understand standards-based grading. Some other important resources are the Kiddom Dictionary to explain all the terms and Kiddom’s Getting Started Guide which walks through all aspects of Kiddom.

 

 

 

How can teachers use this professional development kit?

All the presentations are editable, so teachers can add their own slides, mix and match, or add whatever modifications they’d like. We know teachers like to put their own twist on their work, so we’ve dedicated a slide in each presentation to where the presenter can insert how they use Kiddom and showcase how it helps them.

We also included some pre- and post-surveys as well as a self-reflection guide:

These are completely optional, but a great way to help teachers identify how they want to use Kiddom and how they’ll implement the platform in their schools. This is also a great follow up for the presenter to continue the conversation.

 

This Kiddom Professional Development Kit is all about empowering teachers to help their colleagues save time and get the most out of a new platform. Get started today by downloading the kit here.

At a typical Kiddom school, hands are in the air, there’s a buzz in the room, and teachers and students are energized. Kiddom was designed to help improve teacher retention and increase student performance and graduation rates.

For the first time, the most important parts of teaching and learning are connected and simplified in Kiddom. Curriculum lives in one place and is easily measured and refined, instruction is personalized to meet the needs of each student, and data serves as a powerful system of support for every member of the learning community to keep students on track.

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What People Are Saying

“Kiddom is great for assessing data and then assigning appropriate work based on individual student performance. I love that it's very easy to attach standards and rubric to every assignment.”

Jackie Curts, Middle School Teacher

“Using Kiddom has made me stop and ask, ‘Am I just letting this student repeat what they already know, or am I really challenging them?’”

Ann Leghorn, High School Literacy Specialist

“I can see where my class and any student is at any moment in their educational journey. This way, I can take action to assist them to work towards mastery.”

Mr. Albrecht, High School Teacher

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Building a School-Wide Digital Literacy Curriculum — Part 3 of 3

Building a School-Wide Digital Literacy Curriculum — Part 3 of 3

by | Apr 4, 2019 | Case Studies, Curriculum & Instruction, Product, Responsive Curriculum Management

Aditya Patel

Aditya Patel

Product Success Manager, Kiddom

Passionate about building great products that support excellent teaching and learning practices. Outside of the office, he loves to ski, hike, and wander the streets of a new city in hopes to find a great hole-in-the-wall restaurant.

This is the third installment of a three part series on responsive curriculum management success. You can view the other posts here:

Also related: Introducing Responsive Curriculum Management

If you peek into any classroom today, it is obvious that they’re drastically different than those of just 10 years ago. Devices are cheaper and readily available, and more schools are giving each student their own laptop.

The tools students use on this hardware is becoming more complex, allowing students and teachers to demonstrate and evaluate learning in new media formats. With all these new tools, schools are looking for ways to ensure that their students have the skills and knowledge to effectively communicate in different ways in the modern world.

I noticed that my students struggled to perform basic functions on computers, debunking my hypothesis that they already had mastered most skills.

When I started teaching high school algebra in Newark, NJ, technology was still relatively new to our school. We rolled out laptop carts on every floor and I quickly saw this opportunity to implement Khan Academy’s digital practices in my classroom. However, I noticed that my students struggled to perform basic functions on computers, debunking my hypothesis that they already had mastered most basic technological skills.

Student using a computer in the computer lab to study

It was interesting to see that even though students were comfortable using their mobile phones, those skills didn’t translate to using a computer and other learning tools.

This is not an unfamiliar situation in many schools across the nation; as a result, schools are beginning to implement digital literacy curricula that focus on fostering technical and communication skills which follow them through their professional careers.

As a team, we wanted to mimic how teachers and administrators would build a digital literacy curriculum together using Responsive Curriculum Management (RCM), a tool that allows educators to collaboratively align when building curriculum. 

screenshot of Kiddom Academy dashboard

If you’d like to learn more about the process and learnings from our first two planning cycles, please check out Melissa’s and Nicole’s articles.

For the session I ran, I focused on how we can use our team’s feedback to learn from other educators about their processes and workflows. I brought team members from our sales, marketing, product, and success team to see how they would use each other’s feedback in their role and what else they wanted to know from educators.

Our Objective

In the most recent session, I created a mock environment where teachers across multiple grade-levels came together to build a Digital Literacy curriculum that was intended to be shared across grade-levels.

As the “admin” I decided that we’d use the International Society for Technology in Education’s Standards for Students, which are readily available on Kiddom. If a school wanted to upload their own custom standards, we’d be able to upload those just for the school to use (for more information, check out Kiddom Academy). From there team members teamed up to build assignments for each standard and attached a common rubric for each standard to ensure we can evenly measure student learning across all grades.

Kiddom Reporting Dashboard for Central Elementary School

What We Learned

As I facilitated the curriculum planning session, I took notes about the questions participants were asking and how it related to how teachers plan their curriculum. Some of the questions that came to mind were:

  • How can we promote cross-subject collaboration between teachers?
  • How can administrators provide teachers guidance when implementing curriculum in their classes?
  • When teachers are planning, how can they share their specific lessons/activities with other teachers that are interested?

screenshot of the PD portal

Click the image to visit our new On-Demand PD Portal

After running the session, we wanted to ensure that we captured these findings and incorporate them in our future research with educators. Some immediate next steps for the Success team are:

1. Run a curriculum planning session on-site session - We’re inviting teachers and administrators from the local area to go through the practice of building a curriculum as if they were building their own.

We want to simulate as much as this process as we can and gather their feedback to continue improving our product and support articles. During this time we’ll dive deep how our tools can assist their processes and learn more about how they’re collaborating with their peers.

2. More educator interviews - Over the past few months, I interviewed teachers about their workflows and how they collaborate with their peers. Based on these findings, we’re looking to refine our questions and explore deeper about teacher-to-teacher and teacher-to-administrator.

If you’re interested to participate in a remote user interview, please sign up and when the next one is available someone at Kiddom will reach out. 

You can look forward to more updates from our Curriculum Development team as part of this blog series:

Also related: Introducing Responsive Curriculum Management

To learn more about our new responsive curriculum feature, visit this page. To see a demo of this exciting new feature, book a call today.

Kiddom seamlessly connects the most critical aspects of teaching and learning on one platform.

For the first time, educators can share and manage digital curriculum, differentiate instruction, and assess student work in one place. Learners can take assessments online, see student performance data with the click of a button, and teachers have the insight and tools they need to create individual learning paths.

 

Ready to bring digital curriculum to your school or district?

Connect with us in a 15-minute meeting to learn more about available pre-packaged curriculum, and how the Kiddom education platform can support your learning community.

Request a Demo

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