Updates for February 2022: Youth in the Booth, Dance Teacher Training, LMS Testing

It’s been a positive month for my work at KQED Education. It’s starting feel like we are transitioning toward a more “normal” work flow, with more days spent in the actual office, student visitors to our HQ, conference presentations and workshops filling our days.

Some highlights:

• Co-led session at California Dance Educators Association on how to facilitate dance video creation with students. As an amateur dancer this was particularly gratifying! Sadly, this was a virtual event, so I didn’t get to re-connect with other outstanding dance leaders like Moncel Durden and Traci Bartlow who were also presenting.
• I got to work with several groups of teens in a professional sound booth, to prepare them to participate in the KQED Youth Takeover. I love my job, but I do miss teaching young people!
• Led a successful second meeting of the Bay Area Media Literacy PLC, where we focused on the critical media literacy skills of evaluating online information and critically analyzing media. This is such an incredible group of teachers and librarians, and getting to help them on their individual journeys as media literacy educators is so fulfilling.
• Confirmed that I am co-leading a session at ISTE, one of the largest gathering of educators focused on technology integration, in June in New Orleans! Jazz + tech education? Yes, please!
• Designed an overall plan for course development on a new LMS for the professional learning team. I know that sounds super boring. But I liken it to having incredible dishes on our menu, but not having a functioning restaurant to serve that delicious food to hungry folks. Now we are going to migrating to a much better online space where we can hopefully serve many more people!
• Updated 12 PBS stations on the PBS Certification program and our local efforts, which continue to grow and develop. I’m so excited to see the flowers blooming among our PBS colleagues all around the country. Helping young people understand the media, spot misinformation, and share their voices in online civic spaces could not be more important right now.