This year I finally got to do something that I have wanted to do for awhile, I got to put on an Edcamp in my own district. Edcamp Iowa for those that do not know, is an Edcamp where we have 5 locations throughout the state of Iowa all going on at the same time…
One of my favorite tools for leaving effective feedback for students is Kaizena. Kaizena allows you to easily leave audio and text feedback for students in a Google Doc. This is a free service and one that I suggest to a lot of people because we should be more focused on feedback than grades in…
Last summer Google released the Classroom API so other programs and apps could communicate and integrate with Google Classroom. One of the most recent ones to do this is EdPuzzle. EdPuzzle is great tool for adding questions, feedback, and your voice to premade videos for use in your classroom. You can assign videos as homework…
When I was in early elementary school, I had to use a piece of technology in order to allow me to learn as well as my peers. Without this piece of technology I would not have been able to do as well as I did in school. This piece of technology helped me greatly but…
One of the easiest ways to assist effective collaboration between teachers is to create a shared Google Calendar so all parties involved can get greater clarity. You can easily set up meeting dates and include the agendas, goals, teacher roles, in the event details. You can also share out important due dates and any other…
This is the first part of a series of blog posts where I will focus on collaboration. We will start with the proper mindset to begin and then we will look at the tools and techniques we can use to improve the collaboration that takes place in, and out of, our classrooms. Collaboration, besides…
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…
Donovanscience 