Google Keep is one of those tools that can be very useful but not a lot of people know about it or use it often enough to get enough out of it. While it may look like a simple little sticky note app on the surface, there are some very nice features built in that…
I created my Twitter account in November of 2009 to connect with my own students and share out news articles or resources about science topics. The major byproduct of this was the connections that I started to make with other teachers, whether they were teaching in neighboring districts or even across the country and world.…
Thinking back to my college days, I remember sitting in lecture halls and feverishly writing down all of the notes I could while the professor lectured. It was always a challenge to keep up with what they were saying, writing while at the same time trying to understand and make sense of the new information. This…
Students are expected to present in so many of their classes, but how often do we actually spend time on helping students become better presenters? So many of the student presentations I see involve a ton of words on a slide and the student reading them off, word by word. The students do not look…
One common issue that I hear about a lot, is that as teachers have adopted a more digital workflow in their classrooms, students are not always clear on the how/what/when of the class. Students may get lost in all of the resources or become unclear about what they are supposed to be doing, due to…
You can easily enable a transcript or closed captions for videos in YouTube. This will assist any students, or anyone for that matter, who may have trouble following along, have a hearing issue, or where the video is not in their native language. While the transcripts are not perfect, they are computer generated for the…
One of the biggest obstacles to working effectively in the digital world, is our ability to stay organized and to not fall into the deep end of disorganization with digital files. It is much easier to be an effective educator if you are organized. This was true before computers and is even more true now…
Recently I was watching an episode of Scrubs, one of my all-time favorite shows, and they were reciting the hippocratic oath: DO NO HARM. This is a great oath to follow even for us as educators. It should be one of the primary oaths we operate by as we are here to help ALL students…
This year at ITEC I presented about how to use some basic equations to do more with your data in a Google Sheet. There are about 10 equations that I use on a frequent basis when I am dealing with large amounts of data and I can easily move the data around to create the…
While wandering around the Art Institute of Chicago this last weekend, I ran into a quote by an artist that spoke to me as an educator. The artist was alive in the early 1900’s but spoke about the use of technology as a tool of production, and not just as a way to reproduce what…
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