I took most of the summer off from writing, but now that school is getting back into swing, it's time to start thinking out loud again. Back in May, I wrote about using a new to-do system to stay on top of my work. Then, Robert Talbert tweeted. Again. I've gotten curious about bullet journaling,Read More
The edu-blogification of ideas gets overwhelming. Six years ago, I went to a workshop on using videos to help with my instruction. We called it the flipped classroom and it helped me work more effectively with my students. I learned about my own strengths and weaknesses (watching your videos day after day is a greatRead More
Keeping a todo list has always been a struggle for me. I have a notebook, I have some stuff in Google Keep, I've tried Google Tasks, Any.do, Remember the Milk, and Wunderlist. I've tried apps with goal setting, apps with reminders, and apps with synced web and phone apps. My main problem is that it'sRead More
In what's become a half-tradition, some unfiltered thoughts as I finish another school year. Splitting time between teaching and instructional coaching is really, really difficult. It's hard to pour into both equally. Next year, I'm going to be coaching 100% of the time. I still need to work on alternative assessment and measurement methods. UsingRead More
In November 2015, an independent model showed YouTube received around 500 hours of video content uploaded every minute. There are 1440 minutes in a day, meaning there was roughly 720,000 hours of video every day. That’s a lot of videos. Granted, many are of cats, kids, and Barbie Jeep Racing, so it’s not necessarily qualityRead More
If you've used Endnote Generator in your Docs, thanks. I posted an update this evening which will retain the formatting of your footnotes. So, if you have text formatting (bold, underline, etc) or links, those are still there when the Endnotes are added. You can grab the Addon from the Docs Addon menu. You canRead More
The New York Times profiled Google's rush into education over the last eight years in a long piece this weekend. Some initial thoughts: The value behind the "Innovative Educator" title is completely created by Google. There is no value other than the fact that a company says it has value. Skills in a platform -Read More
Our district is distributing 13,000 iPads in the next 24 months. We have ~1,300 staff who need to be trained on instructional methods with technology in addition to functional training on a new platform, using GSuite effectively and building a course in Canvas. Training has been touchpoint number one for our team. We're not inRead More
I've wanted to try the Desmos activity builder for a long time, so I finally did. We were finishing up the nervous system, so I grabbed a graph of an action potential and went for it. Here's a live student link if you want to give it a try. I set up a few slidesRead More
Some initial, mostly unfiltered thoughts on digital badges from a professional development perspective: Most badging programs are too simple. They focus on rote skill and don't have a clear pathway for building competency on a holistic level. Buy in, like any other initiative, is extremely important. Badging isn't enticing on it's own. And being enticingRead More