Educational Technology

This past week I was tasked with coming up with a way for students to create a short 30-second video project for reviewing some math concepts for end-of-year testing. We previously completed projects using Flipgrid, ReCap, Screencastify and Google Slide in a traditional presentation mode. I decided that stop-motion may be a fun alternative presentation project. I played around a bit with a stop-motion animation app on the Chromebook and then remembered + Eric Curts presentation about Google Slides being used as Stop-Motion. I made a tutorial for the students by focusing on basic transportation, thinking the movement of transportation would be good to show the students. I started with a storyboard concept and duplicated the background in all the slides 30 times first. I picked thirty slides knowing that my default will be one second per slide when I publish. UPDATE: May 22, 2017 - After speaking with several colleagues, I have been told that copying one slide at a time (...

This week is Spring Break for my school system. Before my thoughts get too far away from school and toward a honey-do list and fishing, I shall  discuss my first true teaching  experience with Kindergartners.   As a former high school teacher for 16 years,  I have no preparation for Kindergarten. But, as an i nstructional technology resource teacher, I am assigned several different schools including Moneta Elementary  in Moneta VA  about once a week, every week. And, I have to be honest, I could've avoided Kindergarten if I wanted to. Fortunately for me, I met Mrs. Haywood early in the year and we hit it off.  Due to the willingness to have me in her classroom, Mrs. Terri Haywood and I have formed a wonderful team the one day per week I get to interact with her students. Due to her openness,  I have had the pleasure of getting to know her class of Kindergartners  this year like I have no other.  We have created "This week with...

Good day:  This week I will discuss BreakoutEdu student innovators and  experimentation with Flipgrid. Two 8th grade students at my middle school tackled making a Breakoutedu game for their peers and we introduced Flipgrid afterward to reflect on the experience.  Several weeks ago, I introduced a Breakoutedu to several 8th-grade students in an exploratory science class. Two of these students convinced Mrs. Blake, their English 8 teacher, to allow them to work on a breakout activity with me in their extra time. The boys worked diligently for two weeks whenever they got the opportunity. Lots of work went into the 8th grade English VA SOL review Breakout. Mrs. Blake, the two boys, and I contributed and we are all very proud of the outcome.  We came out with a nine-question SOL review game with locks embedded every couple questions. We used all 3 English classes to play throughout the day. We set up 4 duplicate boxes and ran 4 groups simultaneou...