Dec. 15 Future Ready Network Meeting: It’s All About That Work-based Learning

The December Future Ready Network meeting will be on Dec. 15 and will be a full day with the Future Ready meeting in the morning from 8:30-11:00 a.m. and a workshop session in the afternoon from 12:30-2:30 p.m. District teams can join in person in the Heartland AEA Regional Education Center, 6500 Corporate Drive, Johnston or via Zoom at this link. The day will focus on Work-Based Learning and will include guest speaker Kristy Volesky from the Department of Education Bureau of Career and Technical Education and Laura Williams from the Iowa Clearinghouse for Work-Based Learning. Several districts will also present their Work-Based Learning programs and how they use the Iowa Clearinghouse to manage their projects. The afternoon workshop is for educators who are interested in becoming a district project board manager in the Clearinghouse.

If you would like to know more about becoming a project board manger on the Clearinghouse, watch this short video.

If you are interested in becoming a Clearinghouse project board manager for your district, please complete this survey.

Visit the Heartland AEA Future Ready Website to stay up to date on news, resources, past network Zoom recordings and more! For more information, contact Sue Schirmer, Heartland AEA Professional Learning & Leadership Consultant.

Another Juicy Tidbit About Pear Deck: Make It More Inclusive by Using Immersive Reader

Want to make Pear Deck even more engaging and empowering? The integration with Immersive Reader is an amazing option!

When students activate Immersive Reader in their Pear Deck session, the text from the slides is extracted, opening in a window that provides scaffolding and customization opportunities. Students can make choices to:

• To have the text read to them (and adjust the reading options),
• To change the appearance of the text in terms of size, font, spacing and background contrast color
• To highlight parts of speech and syllables
• To use additional features like line focus and translation

This month’s tip about using Immersive Reader is a recommendation from Michelle Gebel, 5th grade teacher in Indianola. She loves the access to the text students have when using the text-reading feature of Immersive Reader. Take a look!

Each month, be on the lookout for a variety of tips, tricks and testimonials shared via our newsletter, the statewide Iowa AEA website and via social media (@iowa_aea, #iowaaea, Heartland AEA Twitter).

For more information or to share your favorite Pear Deck features and ideas, check out the AEA website!

Heartland AEA Library & Digital Resources December Newsletter is Published

In this issue:

• Ebooks Added to Pebble Go
• Where are the holiday books?
• Winter Traditions
• Copyright BriefNotes Updated
• Social Studies and PBS LearningMedia
• Professional Reading: AASL