Applying tech tools to meet classroom needs.
In the first 11 episodes of the Esports Classroom Podcast, I have been able to get insight from people with a variety of connections to esports. We have had high school coaches, college coaches, members of professional organizations, and others connected to esports. In future episodes we will include more perspectives and even have upcoming…
One of the things we need to teach students the most is how to manage all of the tasks and due dates they have to deal with throughout the course of a school day. While many schools are making use of tools like Canvas or Google Classroom to manage the digital workflows of class, students…
I am someone who loves to use data to understand the problems that we are truly facing. If we say something is a problem, we should have data to support it. Schools have an abundance of data that they can use beyond just grades and attendance, which can often provide a wide view of the…
I saw this image once while mindlessly surfing online and could never find it again. It said, “Please go up the stairs to the 2nd floor to ask for the elevator to be turned on for use.” So if you were someone who needed to actually use the elevator because you could not use the…
In just over 7 weeks, hundreds of educators across the state of Iowa and surrounding areas will come to the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines for the 2024 ITEC Fall Conference. I have been coming to the ITEC Fall Conference for about a decade and a half so far. It is an event I…
In my 20 years as an educator, there are not many things I would rank higher on my pet peeve list than hearing an educator say “low student”. I feel the same way when they say “high-level” student. This desire to label students in such a simplistic way does nothing to help the students and…
One of my favorite sessions to present at education conferences is about removing barriers to student learning. There are many decisions we make, consciously and unconsciously, that impact the learning environment for students. As students have a wide range of needs and learning characteristics, sometimes we are not always aware of how these decisions are…
For over the last decade-plus, my roles in schools have revolved largely around using technology for teaching and learning. I have spent 8 years as a Technology Integration Specialist, 1 year as a Director of Technology, obtained my first Masters in Curriculum and Instructional Technology, am a member of the ITEC Board (including being a…
One of my favorite uses of edtech tools ever is to have a backchannel, whether that was in the classroom or when doing a presentation at a conference. A very memorable experience of mine as a classroom teacher happened soon after my classroom went 1 to 1 where every student was given a laptop. It…
With the rapid rise of easily accessible AI tools this year, there are a lot of educators scrambling to answer the question around how the use of AI in the classroom will impact learning. With this, there is a strong desire to have some written statements around how AI could and should be used in…
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