Foxcroft Academy’s Morrison and Willcott are two of only three teachers in Maine selected to be Apple Distinguished Educators

    DOVER-FOXCROFT — Foxcroft Academy English teacher Mia Morrison and science teacher Julie Willcott have each been accepted to the prestigious Apple Distinguished Educator (ADE) Program. From a pool of thousands of applicants, Morrison and Willcott are among a group of 75 teachers from North America (and three from Maine) selected for the program, which began in 1994 when Apple recognized K-12 and higher education pioneers who were using a variety of Apple products to transform teaching and learning in powerful ways. Today it has grown into a worldwide community of more than 2000 visionary educators and innovative leaders who are doing remarkable things with technology in and out of the classroom.

Morrison

           
Willcott

    “I was thrilled to learn that we had one teacher accepted into the ADE program,” said Assistant Head of School for Academics Jonathan Pratt, who has played a huge role in helping FA’s teachers integrate technology into their classrooms. “But when I learned that both of our applicants were accepted, my jaw dropped because ADE recognition is such a rare thing. Julie and Mia have done pioneering work with iPad and iTunes U integration, and this honor is well-deserved.”
    Applicants to the ADE program must demonstrate, through written responses and a two-minute video, how they’ve integrated Apple technology into their learning environment in meaningful ways and how they’re engaging students and influencing other educators to help transform teaching and learning. Morrison and Willcott, who will be headed to Austin, Texas this July for a week of collaboration with the other 73 teachers accepted, have taken full advantage of the increasing number of tools at their disposal ever since Head of School Arnold Shorey — working closely with Pratt and Director of Information Technology Robert Brown — launched an earnest pursuit of technology-based education upon starting at the Academy in the fall of 2010.
“We’ve seen dramatic changes in how technology is being incorporated in all of our classrooms in just a few short years,” said Shorey, “and Mia and Julie have absolutely been at the forefront of this movement.”
    Morrison, who started her teaching career at Foxcroft Academy in 2007, has required all her students to develop digital portfolios and blogs, has created individual class websites designed to foster greater transparency and organization, has introduced her students to a myriad of useful iPads apps and organizational platforms such as Edmodo, and has worked hard to build an audience for her students’ work that extends well beyond the walls of her classroom.
    She was also one of three high school teachers in the nation featured on “Teaching with iPad and iTunes U”, Apple’s three-part webcast series designed to help educators build customized courses full of dynamic, interactive content. She and Amanda Kaspar of Duke University spoke about how they’ve used iTunes U at their respective schools in the series’ second webcast, “Creating Courses with iTunes U Course Manager.”
    In her application, Willcott discussed how technology has dramatically altered her teaching style since she began her career in education 17 years ago. She has moved away from the memorization and “drill and kill” worksheets that had traditionally dominated science classrooms and moved toward a more hands-on, interactive setting – a transformation that began with the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (which enabled Foxcroft Academy to inexpensively purchase MacBooks for each faculty member beginning in the fall of 2007) but really took flight when FA became the first high school in Maine to deploy iPads to every student and teacher in the fall of 2011. The abundance and diversity of applications available on the iPad have allowed her classes to become more learner-directed, more collaborative, and more creative. The net result, according to Willcott, is a classroom in which students have shown an increased enthusiasm for learning and have demonstrated superior retention of material covered.
    Morrison and Willcott have also been pioneers in Foxcroft Academy’s foray into the world of iTunes U K-12 education. The iTunes U platform was created by Apple in 2007 in order to manage, distribute, and control access to educational audio and video content for students within colleges and universities. It was not until January 2012 that iTunes U was updated to include K-12 courses, at which point Foxcroft Academy, well-positioned because of its trailblazing iPad Initiative, encouraged several of its teachers to develop courses and publish them on iTunes U. Morrison and Willcott did just that, developing a total of six comprehensive digital courses: English I: Characters in Conflict and two separate versions of English III: Identity and Society for Morrison and Chemistry, Physics, and Greenhouse Management for Willcott. As of February 28, these courses along with a few others provided by Foxcroft Academy have received a combined total of more than 165,000 subscriptions on iTunes U.