Google recently launched a new series of mini-courses to support teaching and learning with technology. Each course has tutorial videos, supplementary links, periodic quizzes, and a final assessment. Topics include Internet 101, (Google) Apps for Education, Gmail, (Google) Drive, Chrome OS and Chromebooks. For schools and districts who have adopted Google Apps for Education as well as districts with mobile initiatives or those going BYOD, the GApps Tutorials could be a fabulous… Read More

Join classrooms around the country next week by doing an hour of coding with your students. Code.org has pulled together resources to make coding simple to introduce to students at all grade levels as well as being easy to understand for teachers who are unfamiliar with coding. Why coding and why introduce computer science to your students? The site as some jaw dropping statistics.  By 2020, there will be 1,000,000 more jobs than… Read More

The Common Core provides a number of challenges to classroom teachers. One challenge is the requirement for the increased use of informational text within lessons. To utilize these texts effectively, teachers must provide materials at appropriate reading levels for each student as well as assess each student’s learning and growth. A new website named Newsela provides innovative solutions for these challenges by providing engaging news articles that teachers can assign to students at one of four lexile… Read More

So an email popped into my inbox from an administrator in one of my many districts.   A simple few lines: I have heard a rumor that a student has a picture of naked butts on his iPad.  How would he get these? I had to read that one a couple times, then I laughed.  It was a good belly laugh.  Once I stopped laughing I started thinking about it, carefully, before I… Read More

Today we got together and talked about digital content. It’s coming but we’re unsure about how to get our districts and teachers there. We haven’t even started a conversation about parents yet. Broad themes to consider: content adaptability formats/operating system learning and content management systems infrastructure devices and hardware support teacher training Open Content The confluence of CCSS, technology, and collaborative tools is the perfect segway to getting teachers to contribute. We’ve… Read More