10 Ways to Kami-fy Your Professional Development

We're going to be talking today about 10 ways that you can camify your professional development. I'm Lori Guillen. I am the coordinator for model schools at Washington, Saratoga, Warren, Hamilton, and Essex BOCES, which is located in Saratoga Springs, New York. I am also a trainer with Nice Skate and a proud CAMI hero. I'm going to tell you a little bit about how I do my professional learning as we go through 10 different ways that you can camify your PD. 10 ways that you can camify your professional learning really has to do with adjectives and verbs. And the ones you see in front of you are the ones we're really going to be talking about today. We're going to be talking about having fun, sparking ideas, getting people to move and talk and collaborate. We want to take some time to assess where we are and reflect on how we're doing. We want to give our people that are coming to our professional learning a chance to really celebrate what they've done and ideas going forward. And we want to give them some hands-on approach to what they can bring back to their classroom. The first thing I want to talk to you about today is starting with something fun. When we're talking about fun, we want really from the very first moment they log into your webinar or come into your professional learning session to take some time and do something that gets them engaged right away. One of my favorite ways to do that is to gamify that moment that they first enter. CAMI is great for that because you can create all sorts of different games. I like to create what I call grid games where we can take some time to really explore, getting people interacting, and using the tools right away. So I'm going to walk you through a demo. So when I create the grid games, what I do is I ask the participants as they arrive to find an image that represents them. So it could be any kind of picture or anything that they would like. So what they would do is they would click on the Google image search. So I always have them look up something that is of interest to them. So maybe they want to look up the word car. And when they do that, I ask them to use transparent image after it just so they can find something that doesn't have a background. Once they find one they like, they click on it and they click select. And then what I ask them to do is place it anywhere on the game board that they would like. So here I'm going to place my car anywhere on the board. I have one that I've already started. I have an elephant. That's my favorite animal. And the way this works is everyone, once they have their game piece, chooses where they want to put it on the board. And then as I ask them questions or use cards with vocabulary or things we're going to be talking about, and I'll tell them based on how they answer, whether they move left or right or up or down on the board. Once somebody gets to the final location, which is where it says my word, the word smile, they've won the game. And you can set up these boards in lots of different ways. These grid games can be set up like shoots and ladders where you have the ladders and the arrows. You could have it be more of a snake kind of set up. However you'd like to do your professional learning, you're welcome to do that. So I usually have several boards that they can choose from depending on how many people I have in my session. We want to make sure that we're getting people engaged in the learning process. So this could be something where you can have them draw something. You could have them create a video. You can have them add audio files or use different shapes and images. All of those are right there on the Kami platform for them to use. Another way you want to get your participants engaged is to get them moving. Now this may seem counterproductive in a webinar or even in a crowded classroom, but really there are ways that you can do that on Kami to get people really excited about what they're going to be doing today. So I'm going to walk you through another demo. What you can have the participants do is if you're on a webinar from home, you can ask participants to find certain items. Now I have three icons that you can see on your screen. One being a shoe, one being a slice of cheese, and another being a hat. And you could say the cheese could be any kind of food. And what they would do is they would practice taking pictures of those items as they find them in their room or in their home, and then they would upload them into Kami and then using the media tool on the left-hand side here, they would pull that from their computer onto their Kami One. If you have your participants in a classroom with you in a person-to-person workshop, you can have them find different things in their bag or around the room, take photos of them to practice uploading them into Kami, and then again, do different activities around that object that they found. Another important part of professional learning is to get your participants talking right from the beginning. And one of my favorite ways to do that is to give them a template where they can ask questions, where they can show their work, where they can kind of talk about their process of learning and reflect on what they've learned. And then also to be able to share any images that they might have taken, whether it's a sketchnote or an image or a concept or something along those lines. The template you see on your screen, I ask them to put their group names in. This is great for breakout rooms if you're doing this in a webinar. You give them a space to ask questions. You give them a spot to put in any photos or any pictures that they've kind of put together, a place to answer any questions that you gave them, and then a place to think about what's their next steps. What do they need to do next in order to make sure that they understand whatever it is the concepts were in your professional learning? We definitely want our students to be creating, and that's the same for the people that come to our professional learning sessions. We want to use the drawing tool or using images and using their digital literacy skills to practice so that they can bring that back into their classroom. I have several different ways that I like to do that. I'm gonna show you a few here. One of my favorite ones is to have participants design their own Zoom background. What would a perfect Zoom background be? And what they can do is they can pull images right from the Google Image Search, which is located right here in the Kami platform, and they can bring those images in, or they can click on the drawing tool to actually draw their own backgrounds. Another favorite of mine is to actually have your participants decorate a monster. And what I have them do, and I'm gonna walk you through this one, is you click on the Google Image Search, and I actually like to use the word blob. I find that really is one that you can get some fun images on. I'm gonna grab this one right here and place it on my screen. And then what I have the participants do is add eyes, add legs, add arms, maybe some antenna, whatever it happens to be as they're decorating their monster. And then I have them label the parts using the text tool, saying what it means to them in their classroom. Maybe they have many arms because they multitask on a regular basis. Maybe they have a lot of feet because they're always running from place to place. Whatever matters to them, that's what they're going to do to decorate their monster. A final one I like them to do is actually have them design their learning space. And this could be done for any kind of setup. So if they're trying a project in their classroom and they have to think about how they wanna design it to be for that project, here's a time for them to actually do that in Kami using the drawing tools and the media search. During any type of training, you wanna assess where your participants are to see where you need to go next. But your participants should also be assessing where they are in the process. And one of my favorite ways to do that is in Kami using slides. And the idea here is they have a grid that they kind of follow along where they list what their project is. Maybe they're thinking about doing an inquiry-based learning activity in their classroom. And they think about where they are on that progress bar and they move a sticker right from anywhere that they are along the way. They think about who's responsible for each part of that project, what's happening with that project and any due dates that they know are coming up. And then we start to think about what are the things that they can't do or the things that they can do? What are the obstacles and how can we overcome them? And then we always wanna take some time to share any success stories of things that have worked for you in your classroom. So if you're doing this with an online learning environment or a webinar, you can have different participants talk about the projects that they're doing and then assess where they are along the way. Choice is super important for everybody. And one of the easiest ways to do that in Kami is to set up choice boards. Here, you can set up different squares in a tic-tac-toe board. Again, you can use the game board design, whatever works for you. And you wanna make sure that you tell the participants that they have to click on each one or they have to do a line, make a tic-tac-toe, however it would be broken down for them so that they can have some choice in how they reflect and showcase their learning. The most important thing in any professional learning environment, just the same as in our classrooms, is to celebrate everything. It doesn't make a difference if it's something simple like somebody made an oops. Go ahead and celebrate and say, yeah, you learned something. You learn more from your mistakes than you do from your successes. So celebrate that. You want to foster that growth mindset because they're coming to you to learn something. So give them that time and that space to stumble and then learn as they're moving forward. You can use the audio features, the video features, the drawing features, the stickers, any of those within Kami to really help your participants be engaged in the process and see how they're doing at every step. You wanna make sure in your professional learning that you're taking the time to celebrate everything with your participant. That way they know that they're doing the right things, that they're learning, they're engaged, and most of all, you wanna make sure that they're smiling because whenever we're learning something new, we should be smiling. The next thing that we wanna talk about is allowing for hands-on activities. Now, we already know that if they're moving, if they're creating, if they're filling out charts and doing choice, they're doing some hands-on types of things, but why not have your professional learning feel very much like how we do different things with our students? Recently, I hosted a all-day webinar where we were looking at new standards that we have in New York State around computer science, and we wanted to take a look at the verbs that are within those standards and see where they fit within Bloom's taxonomy. So I created this activity in Kami that allowed participants to have their own copy, and what they were able to do was to drag all of the verbs into the areas where they fall on Bloom's. So if you remember back when you learned about Bloom's taxonomy, you'll remember that the remember and the understand are the base levels of Bloom's, and as you go into higher order thinking, you get to that evaluate and create. So what the participants would do is they would look at the labels at the bottom of their screen, and they would click and drag them into the correct category. So we can look and see where these standards align as they're going through figuring out what type of activities would kind of fit. So we wanna make sure we're doing an activity that fits on the right level of Bloom's as we're going through these standards. Lastly, we wanna make sure we give time for reflection. We know the importance of reflection with our students, but that's where they can kind of assess what they've learned. We need to think about where we've been, what we've learned, what we need to maybe go forward, what questions we might have, and that really can be done very well on the Kami platform. You can do this through video, you could do this through audio, you can have them circle and do different things with the drawing tool, you can have them sketch note, anything that you can do to get your participants reflecting on the learning process of the time they just spent with you is important. I love to do this by using grids where people can add in their own thoughts and add in their own pictures, maybe a meme on how they're feeling using that Google image search in Kami. All of these will allow for great reflection at the end of your professional learning. So now I'm going to turn it over to you. What are some of your favorite engagement strategies? Thank you so much for having me, Kami, and I hope that we can continue this relationship. If you wanna reach out to me on Twitter, my Twitter handle is Smile Learning.