Curriculum & Instruction

This series opened with a conversation with my friend and colleague, Eric Nentrup, who is an educational consultant with his hand on the pulse of AI (artificial intelligence) in education at the national level since he has and is continuing to help publish reports on AI for the Office of Educational Technology in the U.S. Department of Education. I then focused my attention on school districts by chatting with another friend and colleague, Maria Stavropoulus, who has leveraged her statewide connections and is championing AI at the district level. She’s even teaching a college class on using AI in education. I thought it would be nice to round out this series with a discussion with someone working directly with teachers and students in a school, and I knew exactly who that should be.

I’ve been collaborating with my friend and colleague Maria Stavropoulus for a few years on a project for the North Carolina Business Committee for Education (NCBCE), located in the state’s governor’s office. We’ve helped the NCBCE establish a network of student technology teams across the state and have provided guidance, coaching, and some curriculum development.

It seems like I can’t go a day without hearing about AI—artificial intelligence. It shows up daily in my education blogs and e-zines; in the general news; my friends and colleagues bring it up; and it’s in books, movies, and TV shows.

Region 8 Comprehensive Center (R8CC) has collaborated with leadership in the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce’s (ODEW) Office of Learning and Instructional Strategies (OLIS) for the past four years and has embraced a learning journey that shifted from high-quality instructional materials guidance to educational coherence to aligning to curriculum-based professional learning.

When I was in the ninth grade, I took a typing class. It was expected that most students in my school did. We did have electric typewriters back then, not manual, but they were definitely typewriters and not keyboards. My classmates and I learned about the home keys, and over the course of a year we learned the others and different conventions of typing. Typing was an expected skill for most students, so could be considered a basic literacy.

A colleague recently asked me what my approach to capacity building is as a state coordinator in Michigan for the Region 8 Comprehensive Center (CC).

The Region 8 Comprehensive Center (CC) team recently had a meeting to learn more deeply about our capacity building framework.

In another installment of a series on Region 8 CC staff, we profile our two Michigan state coordinators, Amy Colton and Stephanie Irvine, this month.