Getting On Board

Since our students spend much on their time on their mobile devices, I'm thinking it's wise to enable them to access our learning on those same digital tools. I've been in search of a platform that is browser-based, collaborative, intuitive, clutter-free and accessible from laptops, tablets and smartphones. Thanks to John Miller (@agileschools) for introducing me to Trello as a digital tool for collaborative learning. Trello enables us to create a "Flow of Learning" on a clutter-free canvas where we can collaborate and communicate with our students regardless of where any one of us is located. Trello has a Board as its canvas. We can place countless Lists on these Boards. Each List can house many Cards. Each Card can have checklists, attachments, links, conversation activity and more, We have the ability to integrate Trello with Evernote, Twitter, IFTTT and more tools that I rely on daily. I've recently created a Flow from Evernote or Email directly to any Card on any List on any Board. This is helping to have Trello be a central repository of content for our learners.

Our students easily adapted to Trello and are already communicating with me and each other on the Trello Cards specific to our content. I'm attaching documents and links so our students can operate from a central location to learn, understand and apply our content. Trello enables us to create a left-to-right flow that becomes intuitive on our learning journey. As we make progress through our learning, we move our Cards through the Lists from "Still to Learn", "Now Learning", "Learning To Be Assessed", "Assessed Learning" and "Reflections of Learning". Everyone on the Board can visibly see where we are in the process and with what content it is related. The "Reflections of Learning" List holds a card entitled Reflections document. I see this as a shared document for all learners to record our thoughts and reflections on our learning. I can see it housing many "aha" moments and after the fact realizations. All learners can access these thoughts at any time, but might be especially useful to study for tests.

We are in a Standards-Based learning environment and our Trello Cards are created based on the Standards we're learning. Cards can easily be added, moved and archived to create our Flow. Our students and I are already accessing Trello on our mobile devices to work through suggested practice, review checklists aligned to our material, see relationships with Mind Maps and have conversations with each other to clarify and deepen our learning. Each student is a Member of the Board and can move their avatar to any Card indicating that content is something they're currently learning. All individuals in our learning environment can see at any time who is where, who might be helpful as a resource and who might need our support.

With each passing day, I'm realizing there is so much more to Trello to track our learning journey and to keep all involved persons connected to each other and our learning. Just recently, teachers and administrators in other districts asked for access to our Boards to share in the learning, get ideas and to stay in contact with each other. In addition to John Miller, I'd like to thank Mark Kuniya (@MKuniya) and Lauren Moon (@elmoonio) for being inspirational and supportive as we collectively move to make our learning more visible to our students with the aim of putting them in the Driver's Seat for their education.