For example, culinary arts students worked across classes and grade levels to create a Highland Cookbook featuring family recipes from diverse cultures. With digital tools, the cookbook reached an authentic audience, and students became creators, not just consumers.
PL Move: Practice: Learners collaborate to create a product for an authentic audience.
How to read these Powerful Learning annotations
Tag guide
PL Move:… Transferable instructional or learner moves that can be adapted in other contexts
Tech:Enabler / Inhibitor / Mixed: How technology, when present, shapes learning
PL:Purpose / Agency / Curiosity / Connection Qualities of Powerful Learning visible in the design
Agriculture and culinary arts teachers co-plan lessons using shared digital tools, aligning crop production with culinary recipes so that students grow the ingredients they later cook in class. These interdisciplinary projects blend hands-on learning with purposeful tech use, showing students how digital planning, communication, and problem-solving connect directly to real-world outcomes and careers.
Tech: Enabler: Digital Collaboration Tools: Facilitates interdisciplinary teacher co-planning and allows student creations (like the cookbook) to reach authentic audiences.
As a result, sixth graders learning surface area in math teamed up with engineering students learning about form and function to 3D-print bubble wands that produced the most bubbles. Suddenly, abstract math became concrete, creative, and connected to design and play.
Tech: Enabler: 3D Printing: Allows students to apply abstract math concepts (surface area) to creative, tangible design challenges.
At Highland, teachers engage in daily professional learning communities (PLCs), monthly embedded professional development, and recurring coaching cycles that keep technology integration meaningful.
PL Move: Systems: Structures foster cross-role collaboration (teacher teams, learning networks, PLCs).
Improving learning with the power of technolog
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