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…
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…
One of the areas that I am trying to focus on lately is the focus on intrinsic motivation of teacher learners. As someone who helps to design professional learning experiences and for my work on my Gamification of Teacher Professional Learning Project (Project Falcon), it is important to understand how we can improve the motivation…
Tonight I was asked to participate in the first #SwivlChat since I have been a Swivl Video Pioneer for the last 2 years. I received an email from Swivl with a link to Participate (www.participate.com) which was set up for the chat. I had heard about Participate being used for Twitter chats before but had…
Google Keep is one of those tools that can be very useful but not a lot of people know about it or use it often enough to get enough out of it. While it may look like a simple little sticky note app on the surface, there are some very nice features built in that…
I created my Twitter account in November of 2009 to connect with my own students and share out news articles or resources about science topics. The major byproduct of this was the connections that I started to make with other teachers, whether they were teaching in neighboring districts or even across the country and world.…
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…
Students are expected to present in so many of their classes, but how often do we actually spend time on helping students become better presenters? So many of the student presentations I see involve a ton of words on a slide and the student reading them off, word by word. The students do not look…
One common issue that I hear about a lot, is that as teachers have adopted a more digital workflow in their classrooms, students are not always clear on the how/what/when of the class. Students may get lost in all of the resources or become unclear about what they are supposed to be doing, due to…
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