21st Century Educational Partnership Forged by Nortel LearniT Ambassador and NC School

The Millennial Education Workshop

A project begun by Nortel LearniT Ambassador Paul Grooms has grown into a year-long commitment by teachers in rural North Carolina to develop their 21^st century skills. The professional development process involves work with 12 teachers from Graham Middle School in the Alamance Burlington School System.   The Nortel LearniT workshop training team is shown above.

Orientation and training to the Nortel LearniT approach to eTeaching began with a day-long workshop on Tuesday July 29. Joining the teachers from Graham were teachers from a Wilson County elementary school and Nortel LearniT Ambassadors Hector Rosado and Lawrence Sander who have been doing similar work with teachers in their local schools. The focus of the initial training is to introduce these teachers to the Nortel LearniT approach to emphasize the integration of technology throughout the teaching process and to the free online resources and tools that are available through http://www.nortellearnit.org/ .

Helping these teachers transition from being content consumers to producers so that they can support similar skills in their students was emphasized through the training.

The teachers were challenged to evolve their thinking into student centered, project based learning with technology as a tool to engage and facilitate students ability to learn and synthesize core concepts into examples that demonstrate their understanding

The teachers' tools for these tasks included their Nortel LearniT Mobile Camera Toolkit, which Nortel LearniT provided for their use, and Windows Movie Maker, to make their own short video (fully equipped with audio, titles and transitions) based on an educational theme they were assigned. These themes included:  "The history of Graham Middle School", "21st Century eTeaching", "Dream Big", "Science is everywhere at GMS", and "You use math every day". The teams of participants did a great job and their hard work was showcased at the end of the day.

The workshop presentations provided not only learning experiences for the day but also learning materials for teachers to share with their classes, including:

a digital photo safari; a video storyboard template; and technologi-ZING your lesson.

To attune participants to millennial learners, the presenters shared videos titled Pay Attention; A Vision of K-!2 Students Today; It's Ringing; and Nortel LearniT's Shotlists and Storyboards and The Rule of Thirds.  In order to facilitate monthly training workshops, participants were provided their own Nortel Multimedia Communications Server account and were trained on its installation and use. The virtual training workshops will allow participants to continue to build their skills with the goal to have the teachers create, implement and present a Nortel LearniT 6E's lesson plan to  their peers and to share the lesson plan through Nortel LearniT.

Read more about other Nortel LearniT/DPS initiatives and about another Graham Middle School initiative, a career outreach.  View the News of Orange County report of another Nortel LearniT outreach, courtesy of Nortel employee, Lawrence Saunders, who also supported the Alamance training.