Ideas related to the big picture of teaching and learning as well as reflections from the learning process.
Last week I made my first trek to the NETA (Nebraska Educational Technology Association) conference. As part of my goal to connect with other educators in the midwest, I had presented at TIES in Minnesota in December and was very happy to be able to present at NETA which was in Omaha. I had connected…
I was challenged by another educator to respond to the challenge by Scott McLeod to post 5 things we must stop pretending to do in education. I think there are many things that, as educators, we need to stop doing or allow to happen in our schools. I will post 5 now but I am…
I started this week off by heading down to Fort Madison, IA to talk with their MS and HS teachers about effective technology use in the classroom and to conduct some Google Apps workshops as part of their professional development day. The main focus of my talk started with a simple slide that asked “What are…
Yesterday I decided to try out a new tool that others were talking about on Twitter to create images for presentations or to just share out. Unfortunately that tool had a lot of paid features and that means it will most likely not be one I would suggest to other teachers, unless those paid features…
Last week we rolled out the use of #ameshighpride to all students at the high school through homeroom. Teachers were introduced too the use of the hashtag in the fall and there have been a lot of great posts using that tag before we rolled it out to students. There are a couple reasons why…
During our Cognitive Coaching class this week, all of our current instructional coaches are taking this course, we were to focus on an issue that was making us “stuck”. For me this was easy, I was “stuck” on how to develop the last round of professional development times with our teachers that was going to…
Transferring to the Makerbot The next step was to export from Sketchup into a file format that the 3D printer software would recognize. As we were using a Makerbot as our 3D printer, I was able to download the software for the printer for free. I exported from Sketcup, imported into the Makerbot software and…
One of the subjects getting a lot of focus on lately is the idea of makerspaces and 3D printing. I work at a High School where we do have some classes that work on creating things and even using a 3D printer as part of their assignments, but I had never used a 3D printer to…
This last weekend I attended EdcampIowa in Ankeny, IA. This was one of the 4 (was supposed to be 5 but there was not enough interest at one site) sites across the state to make up what has to be the largest Edcamp (if you combine all of the participants). There were some great discussions…
Recently my school was lucky to be part of the Iowa Teacher Leadership Grant that allows us to gain funds to support the hiring and placing of teacher leaders into positions to help our school improve and move forward. The grant money goes towards paying for various positions such as Teachers on Special Assignment (TOSAs),…
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