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…
One of the things I am happiest with that we tried last year, was the start of our own district Twitter chat. We have been sharing Twitter as a powerful professional learning tool for the last couple of years but I wanted to help our teachers experience the effectiveness of a chat by giving them…
ISTE 2016 is just weeks away and as part of my preparation for this great conference, I have created a new Flipboard magazine for the event. For those of you that do not know, Flipboard is a great tool for resource curation – at least that is how I use it. You can easily flip…
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…
Earlier this week I was at the annual ITEC conference in Des Moines and had the opportunity to try out one of the Breakout Edu Challenges. (http://www.breakoutedu.com/) If you have not heard about Breakout Edu, head to their site to check it out. It is basically a classroom version of the breakout room challenges that…
Something that may be difficult for many people to do well, is to work with others in a truly collaborative way. Too often we end up working in a group that is inefficient and detracts from our intended goal. This is true for teachers and students alike. There are some ways that we can improve…
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…
As we get ready to start our shortened week due to Thanksgiving, I thought I would reflect on something I am very thankful for. I would not have survived my first couple of years of teaching if it wasn’t for other teachers sharing with me everyday. I worked with a great bunch of teachers during…
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