Ideas related to the big picture of teaching and learning as well as reflections from the learning process.
Last Friday I received an email that was the best email I have received in quite a while. I got the acceptance email from the Google Innovator Academy and I will be taking part in the Boulder Cohort this June, right after ISTE. This was my 4th time applying which just goes to show that…
One mistake that I would like correct in my work as a technology integrationist, was using only SAMR when talking with teachers a couple of years ago. I had time with teachers in my building, not a lot of time but a couple of hours, and I decided to introduce SAMR to them. We were…
I attempted my second ever 3D print job today as we were testing out a new 3D printer in our district. My design was for a remote holder for our Swivl robot so that it would work better in a few situations we have encountered. I created my design using Google Sketchup and loaded it…
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…
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…
Last night while driving back from visiting my in-laws, after 5 hours on the road, I realized that we had made a big mistake. On Friday, my son and I drove 30 miles to my wife’s work to pick her up to save her the time driving home before we left. It wasn’t until after getting…
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