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
Bill Fitzgerald already wrote an analysis of what can happen now that Congress has essentially erased privacy rules governing how Internet Service Providers can gather and sell your information indiscriminately, so I won't get into that here. If you're in #edtech, listen up: School data can now be used by the service provider to gatherRead More
If you're working in instructional support (#edtech, instructional tech, learning support...whatever you want to call it) you've probably heard, "Today's students just learn differently." No they don't. Writers will write. Storytellers will tell stories. Musicians will make music. Athletes will compete. People have drives to be creative, curious, playful, impactful, relevant... What's different is theRead More
Teaching is being overrun by impostors. Perhaps I'm reading into something, but the explosion of "Teach Like a [thing]" culture scares me. Culturally, have we reached a place in education where taking on a persona to find inspiration for change is the best option for our students? Simile is powerful and inspiration comes in manyRead More