In August I had the privilege of attending the Google Certified Innovator Academy in Sydney. It was a crazy trip: two red eye flights, an ‘amazing race’ in downtown Sydney, lots of design and moonshot thinking, encouragement to think big but start small, and an expectation that I would spend the year working on an … [Read more…]
I recently came across this post: 4 Fake Sites to Teach Students Website Evaluation, which includes some of my favourite fake websites, and wanted to share some of my experiences using them, and an idea for extending how we teach website evaluation. DHMO is a classic. I have to always bite my tongue as I just … [Read more…]
A lot of my current thinking is around how to help teachers know HOW to use the collaborative tools in GSuite, not just know ABOUT them. One area that I find doesn’t get a lot of attention is how to share a link. I personally like to do it while I am also setting the … [Read more…]
I started participating in #sketch50 a few weeks ago on a whim. I now find myself a bit addicted to the challenge of drawing a new sketch every day based on the word or theme presented. It has certainly been a challenge. After participating for a few days I realised that a credentialing system for … [Read more…]
I love this image. Thank you to @robreetz for sharing it. It has helped me to connect the dots between The End of Average, which I have been reading on and off, and the excellent #IMMOOC Twitter and You Tube Live conversations about the Innovator’s Mindset that George Couros has been leading over the past … [Read more…]
As a Design Technology teacher my students are constantly creating Computer Aided Design (CAD) files. These might be from 2D Design (.dtd), Photoshop (.psd), Sketchup (.skp), and (hopefully soon) 3D printer files (.stl). In the past, getting the files from their computer to the appropriate machine involved lots of passing USB drives around in a … [Read more…]
Nothing beats a face to face conversation. I am reminded of this constantly as I work with teachers to help them incorporate our school’s relatively new G Suite (I still want to call it Google Apps) platform into their workflow. Every conversation gives me small insights into the unique frustrations each teacher and department struggle … [Read more…]
I am slowly working my way through Talk Like TED by Carmine Gallo, which is full of useful presentation advice that I am trying to apply in my classroom. Today I was reading about emotionally charged events and came across this interesting excerpt: An emotionally charged event (usually called an ECS, short for emotional competent … [Read more…]
I just upgraded my Diigo account as I plan to use it a lot next year to help share resources with teachers at my school. In the process I discovered the outliner tool, which seems to be a great way to organise bookmarks and turn them into useful knowledge (to quote Diigo). Here is one I made … [Read more…]
Some thoughts on school improvement and self-organization from a simpler way by Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers, that I couldn’t figure out how to fit into my final Masters paper. The world we work in, and into which our students will graduate, is very different from the one many of us were prepared for … [Read more…]
