Earlier this month I created a new site (https://gamifyschool.com/) as part of my Google Innovator Project. My original goal was to develop a teacher learning gamification model using feedback from teachers but as I got deeper into the project, I discovered that there is a very large variety of different gamification models out there. Gamification…
Earlier this year we purchased Swivls for each building in our district to be used by our teachers in their work in the classroom, as well as their work with our instructional coaches. The Swivls are great when we want to record classroom situations to be shared with others, but they can also play a role…
Thinking back to my college days, I remember sitting in lecture halls and feverishly writing down all of the notes I could while the professor lectured. It was always a challenge to keep up with what they were saying, writing while at the same time trying to understand and make sense of the new information. This…
Thanks to Curt Schleibaum (https://twitter.com/curt_truc) (http://www.geekyedtech.com/home) for showing me this initially at the Google Innovator Academy this last summer in Boulder. I have tried creating my own Chrome Extension before but didn’t get very far, I mostly just did it for learning purposes. When he showed how he was using his Chrome Extension to share…
I am helping out this week in a classroom where the teacher wanted to do something other than the posters they had done in the past. We decided on allowing the students to choose what they use to do the project as long as it could be shared with others and met the contextual guidelines.…
It has almost been a week since I dipped my bike tires into the Mississippi as I completed (well, 6 of 7 days so mostly completed) another Ragbrai. Ragbrai is a bike ride across Iowa which this year’s route meant over 400 miles with a difficult last day due to the biggest hills I have…
Another week being surrounded by 20,000 other educators is over and it is time to decompress and reflect over what I have learned. ISTE is a large conference and there is a lot you can learn and take away. #1 – New Challenges Keep You Learning This year I challenged myself to present multiple…
I am lucky to be attending the annual ISTE Conference again this year, in lovely (and probably very hot for this boy born in Minnesota) San Antonio. I wanted to be active this year at #ISTE17 and I think I have met my goal. I am slated to present (either alone or part of a…
One of my favorite things to do as a kid growing up in Minnesota was to go out on the lake and spend all day fishing. I spent a large part of my childhood in the summers fishing and would jump at the chance to learn something new in order to become a better fisherman.…
One of my favorite outcomes of technology being so readily available and cheaper for students to use, is that our students can make use of green screens in videos that they create. There are so many apps or programs out there that have the ability to do the green screen effect well that this is…
Swivl recently released an update to their software, also a new app (https://www.swivl.com/pro-plus/), that allows you to use multiple iPads to record at once. You can have up to 5 iPads recording video, and audio, at once. This allows you to easily record up to 5 different students, or groups, in a classroom at once.…
As someone with pretty much no artistic ability whatsoever, I am continually looking for images and graphics from others to use in my resources and presentations. I always look for copyright free media or media that has a Creative Commons license for reuse/remodification. This is why I like to use https://pixabay.com/ so much but there might…
For my first time teaching a college level course (4 week online seminar class for College of Education students), I wanted to make sure I was following all of the research I have read since my last time teaching. One of the biggest things I have read was on the impact of effective feedback and…
Back in 10th grade, I started playing golf as my spring semester sport. The three years before that I had been playing tennis but we moved to a different district, and they did not have boy’s tennis. I had only golfed a little bit before then but it was a sport that seemed like fun…
Teaching is a very tough job. You have 24, or more, students in a class 5-6 times a day. There is a lot going on in the class and it is very easy to get overwhelmed when you are trying to help every student be successful. Many teachers make this even tougher on themselves by…
