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If you haven’t heard of New Visions Cloud Lab, this fantastic project associated with New Visions for Public Schools offers a range of add-ons that greatly extend the functionality of the G-Suite platform, particularly Google Sheets and Google Forms. In this blog post, I feature four New Visions add-ons that are really helpful in creating … Continue reading Four Add-ons that Make Google Sheets and Forms Super Awesome
Our district recently completed it’s 5-year plan to become fully one-to-one with Chromebooks in grades 3 – 12. We started this journey back in the fall of 2013 with a rollout of Chromebooks at the high school, back when these devices were still something of a novelty. In the fall of 2018, we equipped our … Continue reading Screen Time: Seeking a Healthy Balance of Technology Use
The traditional classroom lecture has come under fire lately with calls for student-centered learning, personalization, collaboration, and increased student agency. All these things are great and I wholeheartedly support efforts by teachers to transform their teaching from the traditional to one where teachers act as facilitators for learning. That being said, there are times when … Continue reading Peer Instruction – Don’t Give up on the Lecture Yet
Our school district is in the northwest corner of Missouri, we have 2350 students and approximately 300 staff throughout the district. Our technology journey started on a very bumpy road. The current journey began 4 years ago with the retirement of the Director of Technology. A search for a new director culminated in the hiring … Continue reading A Bumpy Road to a District Technology Initiative
When our school went 1-1 a several years ago, we anticipated that classroom management would be a potential challenge for teachers. In an effort to be proactive, we held a meeting with faculty before our roll-out to provide them with some ideas for how to adapt to this new environment. Here are some of the … Continue reading Classroom Management in a 1-1 Environment
Last week, I attended a round table discussion about digital citizenship with a group of educational leaders from around the country. This was a spirited discussion that served to illustrate the complexity of the issues around digital citizenship as well as struggles that districts are facing in their efforts to address this challenging topic. Here … Continue reading Some Thoughts on a Recent Digital Citizenship Round-table Discussion
The traditional classroom lecture has come under fire lately and a host of new interactive tools has done lots to fuel this movement. I still believe that a skilled teacher can deliver a meaningful, engaging, and informative lecture and there will always be a place for this type of delivery model in education. That being … Continue reading Interactive Lectures in a Technology-Infused Classroom
A while back, I wrote about how our district handles damage for our 1-1 Chromebook program. In that post, I mentioned that we have a student-run help desk. Our Student Technology Assistant Team, or STAT Desk, has been instrumental in keeping our 1-1 program running smoothly, serving as a first point of contact to our student … Continue reading Support Your 1-1 Program with a Student Help Desk
