In case you haven’t seen my previous post, here, I am trying something new this term to help share out the effective uses of technology that are happening in our classrooms at my school. I fully believe collaboration and sharing are integral to a program’s success and this is one way that I am trying…
Yesterday I had the pleasure of presenting at the Iowa 1:1 Conference in Des Moines, IA. This was not my first time presenting there as I had presented in 2011 about the Flipped Classroom I was implementing. This time I presented twice, first on Flipped Professional Development and then on using Doctopus in the classroom.…
Dan Meyer recently gave a keynote at CUE 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRsE6mKkDjw) and discussed how it was not about the tool but was about the mission in the classsroom, and I could not agree more. A teacher recently asked me for a good tool to use and I had to pause, for a long time. I know…
One thing that was useful for me this year was the ability to have people sign up for times on my calendar so we can meet. They could easily see if I was available or not and when they selected the time they wanted to meet, that time was automatically added to my calendar. I…
True learning involves a process that never ends, we are continually growing and changing as we learn. The learning process is one that should make us continually evaluate what we “knew” before and allow to us make changes to everything as we learn something new. Learning involves a process of trying things out, possibly failing,…
There are a few features that many teachers want to be added to Google Forms to increase their effectiveness as an assessment tool, both formative and summative, in the classroom. One of these, which can make it a little bit more difficult to cheat, is the ability to randomly rotate the choices in a question.…
Something gaining a lot of speed with those that use iPads in schools is App Smashing. App Smashing is when you use multiple apps to complete an activity or task, that there is no one app to do all of which you want to do. A fun one to see is when a student uses…
Using video to give directions or to explain something can be really useful in a classroom. However, you may not always have the bandwidth or time to deal with a video, especially if you only want a small clip of that full video. The Google Chrome extension MakeGIF can convert a section of a YouTube…
In the classroom I would always make sure that all levels of my students were able to show growth. I realized early in my teaching career that you can not just focus on one level or you will lose the rest. The same can be applied in my role as technology integrationist. As the year…
One of the biggest comments from our last full day tech professional development day was the appreciation to learn from other teachers about what they are doing in their classrooms. This is a common comment from many teachers about how we like to learn from each other especially about what each person is doing in…
Donovanscience 