Ideas related to the big picture of teaching and learning as well as reflections from the learning process.
Spring Break is a great time to refresh and to get ready for the final part of the school year. It can also be the time you use to prepare to try something new in the classroom. I did my first trial of a flipped classroom after spring break, using the time before and during…
One of the best things that I did this year was attend a couple of Ed Camps. Before last spring I had never attended an Ed Camp or really even heard too much about them. I would see some stuff on Twitter about them but didn’t think too much about it. Luckily I had some…
One key thing that can happen when students have easy access to technology is that their work can be shared with so many other people. When we have students produce work in class that just goes to the teacher, there is an audience of 1. If we have that same student share that piece of…
This is not my first time going through the implementation of a 1:1 as I was previously at another school before and during the first 3 years of the 1:1 there. There we gave our students the white MacBooks and we had some successes as well as some, well, we will just call them not-successes.…
One thing that many people have trouble with when viewing the effectiveness of technology in the classroom, is that technology can not solve bad teaching. In many classrooms you will see techniques that are not effective but they are still being used, due to many reasons such as a lack of time to develop better…
As a student I would view snow days as a time to forget about school. As a teacher I would view them as a big disruptor that would cause me to lose the flow of learning and would delay the next activity, whether it was a test or a project. While students easily can see…
One of the biggest reasons that I push Twitter on to ever teacher I meet is that I find that it has so many benefits in my own personal growth as an educator. One of the prime examples of that is when I want to be at an educational conference but can not go due…
This past weekend I spent a good portion of my Saturday cheering on the Ames High Science Bowl team as they competed at the state competition at Iowa State University. During my first three years of teaching I was the coach for our Science Bowl team at Jefferson High School in Cedar Rapids, IA. (Events…
One of my goals for this year, and for the future if I am not successful this year, is to be accepted into the Google Teacher Academy. The next academy has not been posted yet but I have already started working on my application. The key component of the application is a 1 minute video…
We had a successful technology integration professional development day the other day at Ames High. To read more about the setup for the day, check out my blog post about PD on the Inside. One very interesting observation that I made today as I was walking through the hallway was the increase in the use,…
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