The tribe of T³ Instructors gathers the day before the 2013 T³™ International Conference to learn together. I am honored to be part of the team that has been asked to facilitate a PD experience for my colleagues and friends.  Our topic: TI-Nspire Advanced Authoring – Designing for Learning and Inquiry.

Below is the description as it was sent to the T³ Instructors and our tentative agenda. (Note: The links in the agenda below are password protected and available only for face-to-face professional development participants.)

TI-Nspire Advanced Authoring – Designing for Learning and Inquiry

Facilitators:
Ruth Casey, Jill Gough, Sam Gough, Jeff McCalla

From the PD signup document:
Design For Learning – 120 minutes
This workshop was successfully piloted last summer.  The focus was on the effective design of activities, using TI-Nspire to encourage student learning.  This session will give you an overview of the goals of the PD offering, and the instructional approach taken in the workshop.

Goals:

• Introduce the big ideas of this course experientially by designing a quadratic investigation.
• Share the Design for Learning and Inquiry Google site.

Materials Needed:

• Diagnostic Assessment sent via email to participants by Monday, March 4, 2013
• TI-Nspire Navigator for Networked Computers
• Chart paper and Markers for Storyboarding

Agenda:
(15 min) Introductions
Review Diagnostic Assessment Results
(30 min) Introduce the Anatomy of a Document
Anatomy of a Document and investigation
(60 min) Introduce Storyboarding
Instructor modeled storyboard and design of a lesson and Storyboard a concept using principles of  “Anatomy of a Document”
(15 min) Share the Design for Learning and Inquiry Google site

We encourage the idea of Storyboarding prior to launching in to designing with TI-Nspire. We are inspired by Garr Reynolds and Presentation Zen.  In particular we are going to try to avoid creating Nspire documents that are slideuments. For more information, please read “Slideuments” and the catch-22 for conference speakers. Can we begin to see ourselves as designers of learning experiences?

We want our participants to learn to design a one-page TI-Nspire document that promotes student investigation, learning, and inquiry.  Our goal is to discuss – experientially – the essential learnings for the summer workshop. We know we can’t do justice to a 2-day workshop in 2 hours.  We planned to go deep into one activity rather than cover the entire agenda at a rapid pace.

These essential learnings are:

At the end of this workshop, participants should be able to say:

• I can exercise the ideas of restraint and simplicity when designing learning investigations.
  • I can identify what is important and remove what is not important.
  • I can design where less is more visually – I can include only what is necessary to promote inquiry and investigation.
  • I can design documents that are engaging and prompt questions and inquiry from the learner.
• I can storyboard a learning investigation prior to beginning to design to streamline the concept and balance the information to be learned.
  • I can explain the goal of the activity and outline the expected learning outcomes.
  • I can design a variety of dynamic constructions that are controlled by different inputs including points, sliders, and stored variables.
  • I can design documents with a variety of outputs, which use color and strings to support opportunities for  visual connections.
• I can create TI-Nspire documents to promote student investigation and inquiry.
  • I can enhance documents with conditional statements to make information appear and disappear as needed to enhance a lesson.
  • I can apply TI-Nspire construction tools: geometry tools, scatterplots, data capture, etc. to create the investigation.
  • I can use free points, restricted points, sliders, stored variables, etc. to control the actions in the document.
  • I can use color, text boxes, strings, etc. as inputs and outputs to connect ideas and promote questions.