This is the first part of a series of blog posts where I will focus on collaboration. We will start with the proper mindset to begin and then we will look at the tools and techniques we can use to improve the collaboration that takes place in, and out of, our classrooms. Collaboration, besides…
As part of my application for the Google Innovator Academy, always looking for new learning experiences and this seems like a great one, I decided to focus on collaboration as the vision component for a problem to solve. I did a lot of thinking last summer as I was trying to determine my goal for…
One of the ideas that I have been interested in a lot over the last couple of years has been gamification. As someone who grew up as a gamer with the original NES and as someone who loves to play tons of board and card games, I think there are a lot of ideas in…
I believe that as educators we must remember that we must be learners first and never stop learning. While it may be easiest to be ok with where we are at, it is not what is best for our students. I started my teaching career by replacing a teacher who had given up on finding…
Google has recently opened up applications for their newly rebranded Google Innovator Academy (https://edutrainingcenter.withgoogle.com/certification_innovator) and as part of my personal goal to look for new learning opportunities, I am working on my application. What I love about the application is the unusual question that is at the top of the application. The first question you…
Last month we finally put in place something that I had wanted to do for a long while, have a Twitter chat with teachers from my district. The reason for this was to create an opportunity to have discussions that we normally do not get to have due to time or location. We are a…
When Google added the Calendar integration with Classroom, they pretty much released another feature that many had wanted, sharing with parents. Now, parents still can’t log into Classroom unless they use their student’s information but they can easily see the Calendar that is created with that Classroom to see due dates for assignments. This is…
One of the ways that we have used the Swivl the most during the last year has been in regards to teacher reflection. Various teachers have used the Swivl to record their lesson so they can use it to analyze the lesson and reflect on what went well and what didn’t. It is useful to…
Zaption, a tool that allowed you to embed questions and student feedback into a video, has come out with some updated tools that are useful for a whole-class activity. Now, if you are going to show a video to your class, keep it short and to the point. There is hardly a time where we…
I was on a Google Apps message board and I saw a question that I had seen way too often, it was asking how someone could digitize a worksheet. They just wanted to convert the paper worksheet into something their students could fill out on an iPad or computer. They weren’t asking how to improve…
Donovanscience 