By Chelsea Hodge, Client Consultant
Every company dreams of their customers coming up with innovative new ways to use their product. We here at Lucid are lucky enough to have had this dream come true on multiple occasions. Some of these innovations that we’re most excited about are the incredible ways in which teachers have brought Building Dashboard into the classroom and turned it into a powerful learning tool.
After years of hearing stories from teachers about their success using Building Dashboard in the classroom, we decided that we needed to stop hoarding these great ideas to ourselves and start sharing them with all of our customers. Five documents that we’re unveiling today — a Guide for Educators and four sample lessons — mark the beginning of this effort.
To create these documents, we partnered with Rich Calhoun, a veteran teacher and huge advocate of using Building Dashboard in the classroom. Rich, who teaches high school physics at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, tells this story about how he got hooked on using Building Dashboard three years ago:
“We have a PV array on the roof of our science building here, and one blustery February day when I and my students were all watching the PV array output on the Dashboard, the room all of a sudden got very dark as a big cloud mass went right overhead. And then one-Mississippi…two-Mississippi…we saw the solar production start to fall off. And that for a lot of the kids was an ah-ha moment. For the kids, it was like ‘Oh wow! That’s really neat. I just saw the data happen!!!’ That moment was really the inspiration for starting to work with the Dashboard a little more, and to really incorporate it into my kids’ classroom experience.”
Drawing on this and his subsequent experience using Building Dashboard in the classroom, Rich drafted four sample lessons: two for high school, one for middle school, and one for elementary school. Each lesson is packed with discussion questions and exercises that take advantage of the fact that Building Dashboard displays student-generated data in a format that is both easy to understand and easy to manipulate. We’re happy to announce that all four lesson plans, which also include a few of our own ideas, are available starting today to Lucid customers (via the Building Dashboard Management Portal), and will be available to the general public in a new Resources section on our website later this month.
These lessons, of course, are just a jumping off point. Says Calhoun, “None of the lesson plans are designed to be strictly followed. I don’t teach that way, and I know most of my peers don’t either. As teachers, we all love to adopt lesson plans to meet the needs of our students.”
To compliment the sample lessons, Calhoun crafted another great piece, “Using Building Dashboard in the Classroom: A Guide for Educators.” Teachers can think of this document as a product guide written just for them. In addition to explaining all of the Building Dashboard features that teachers will be most interested in, the guide includes examples of how teachers at four different schools incorporated Building Dashboard into their curriculum. The Guide for Educators is available in the same places as the lesson plans.
And our parting words for this piece are: TEACHERS! We want to hear from you! If you have used Building Dashboard in your classroom – using these sample lessons as a starting point, or not – let us know how it went. What worked? What didn’t? What got your students jumping out of their seats? (Ok, so maybe we’re a bit delusional about how exciting Building Dashboard can be.) But seriously, we’d love feedback. Emailing us at info@luciddg.com works great. Or better yet, share your ideas with other teachers by leaving a comment on this post.
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