Ed Tech in Our Classrooms

 Hannah sat down with me (via Zoom) to talk about tips and hints about the Google Certified Exam. After listening to her, I am convinced that you should do quite well.

 And fails beautifully. Nice try Elizabeth Austin.

 One of your online-only classmates earned the Google Educator Level One award after taking the test last week. Well done. I will make a brief interview with her so she can share her experiences about how she prepared and what it was like to take the test.  

3D printing in the classroom One of the more exciting up and coming technologies in the classroom is the 3D printer. 3D printers are extremely powerful tools but the barrier to entry can be high, especially with no experience in CAD (computer-aided design) and 3D modeling.  Fortunately, if there's one good thing about the internet it's that you do not need to redesign the wheel! There are many resources available to help with getting started with 3D printing! In class, we talked about Tinkercad which is a great entry-level application to learn the basics of 3D modeling, but there are lots of other resources to explore! Let’s take a look! T-Rex Model In my house, we have 2 printers and at least one is running most of the time. Currently, they are printing a miniature model of a T-Rex skeleton. My husband has wanted to make a mini-museum for a long time and he finally bought the plastic to do it. However, modeling accurate skeleton replicas is easier said than done. What he ended...

 Google Teacher Podcast. They are 122 podcasts deep and they are pretty decent. I think they have managed to keep the chit chat down to a minimum so you can get to the interesting tech stuff more quickly. Here is the link to the most recent one: Build Classroom Community with Google Tools 

This week was the 40th anniversary of my first day as a teacher. I was a mid-term replacement and one of the school's first special education teachers. Since that day, I have taught in rural and urban settings both elementary and secondary, and in schools in Japan, Ontario, and Arizona. I'm proud to find myself now a professor of Teacher Education at EMU. Not too shabby for the first kid in his family to go to university. You never know where this degree in teaching will take you.

There is an interesting group of like-minded individuals across the state called GEG: Google Educator Group . They offer many activities including webinars and competitions.  Yesterday I participated in what they called the GEG Games . Several teachers and Ed Tech-consultants submitted a short video demonstration of a Google tool. We then had to vote on the four best of them. One of my former students, now a teacher in East Jackson, did one with her students.  Take a peek [ LINK ] and you might learn some cool tips and tricks along the way. I did.  

Minecraft Throughout my architecture class in high school, we were requested to use the Minecraft (Education Edition) to build and create different things. I specifically used it to understand the physics of architecture. We were tasked with creating a rollercoaster, by being given set amounts of items. The main challenge was to use these limited resources and physics combined to reach the end length of the track we needed without stopping. It was a fun task but provided a way for my teacher to assess us on how we were understanding the physics of architecture. www.education.minecraft.net

 My school district paid for a group viewing of the film Screenagers  a couple of years ago and during the student-only showing (parents had an evening viewing) the students howled with laughter and derision and the "concern" the parent had for her daughter's use of her smartphone.  This week we will have a showing of Screenagers: The Next Chapter  and there won't be any of that howling at the screen that we had at the middle school. Instead, parents are invited to take advantage of a special pass to stream the video onto their home systems.  The issue of appropriate screen time will certainly be something you encounter as a teacher. If you get a chance to see the video, please do.

  The idea of blending seems like something that is super beneficial to students. In the video one student is seen saying that he learned more by pairing the technology with his lesson than he had the whole week without technology. To me that is amazing and something I know that I could have used as a student myself. The closest I ever came to blending and/or learning how to use tools for blending was in Technologies in Math here at Eastern (Math 382) where we used the app Educreations  to show how a math problem works. Now after having this experience and watching the video on Canvas, I feel that this type of tool would be great for students. To be able to post a step by step lesson or “how-to” for a problem that students can watch whenever is something that I would love to use in a classroom one day and is something I know that students could benefit from.

 Hello Google Workspace. Google rebranded its G Suite of applications to become more competitive with Microsoft (apparently). This means I will have to update all my scores of pages that have G Suite on them.  It almost makes me want to re-name everything "Google Stuff."

When I was a supervisor at Tim Horton’s, I worked with five high school students on my afternoon team. One of the students told me about his English assignment where he had to tweet like a character in the book he was reading for class. The tweet had to be in the character’s voice and had to be about what was happening in the story. For example, Juliet might twee “lol hate that the Montagues and Capulets got to fight #love.” He enjoyed that he can use twitter in the classroom. It challenged him to fit everything in 140 characters, but part of the lesson was being concise.

 I have been part of a great conversation with COSN (Consortium for School Networking) folks. And there was Ruben Puendeura just a couple of Zoom windows away from me. He's the fellow who developed the SAMR model. 

Student Post: Madison Keillor Traditional board and card games can teach things with or without modifications. A lot of games can deal with probability as the game might be up to a roll of the dice and other games deal with simple addition often with multiple dice rolls so groups of 1-6 or adding scores over rounds. There is a game my family recently got that involves both addition and multiplication as you make “rivers” from one end to the other, each player or team trying to get the rivers to connect on two opposite ends (East and West or North and South). You add the places where the river comes on one end and multiply it by the other end to get your final score and thus this game could be used for students starting out with multiplication. Besides math-related games, memory could help young children with their memory and recognizing similarities and differences, and there are other themed games that could also help with other subject areas. There are surely more card and board game...

 Many teachers are starting each of their Zoom classes reminding their students to limit the number of tabs they have open to reduce the lag time and frustration for their students. The reminder phrase I have heard most often is "Friendly Four." Teachers (and Chromebook experts) have suggested that having only four tabs open at a time is a healthy practice for these widely used computers.