Learning in Progress

This post first appeared on FTISEdTech Recently, while trying to help one of our Music teachers hack a lesson that included a paid app that we don't have access to, I discovered a strategy for using the Duck, Duck Moose apps - Draw& Tell , Superhero Comic Maker , or Princess Fairy Tale Maker combined with Green Screen by Do Ink that allows you to create a layered green screen videos that makes it look like students are interacting with comic book style characters. Create your Animation To make it look like you or your students are are between a background and the animation, you will want to create a "green screen" animation by either using the picture of a green screen or by filling in the background of a blank scene with green. You will then set your scene.  Add writing, characters or letters.  Stickers will move during recording.  You can also add voice overs while you're recording, or maybe play a song in the background.  Whatever audio you ha...

This year I am so glad to have discovered the power of using digital style interactive notebooks with students. As a new Technology Integration Specialist in a district that has recently adopted a digital conversion process at the elementary level, I was looking for ways teachers could integrate our new technology while maintaining teaching practices they were most familiar with. As a result, I turned back to the work of Robert Marazano  and the research his group has done in regards to High Yield Strategies for teaching and learning, and I began to re-examine some of the texts I had used as a new teacher a few moons ago.   By looking at High Yield strategies, I was able to begin the process of identifying ways that we could incorporate tech into every day activities like reading assignments and vocabulary.   I settled on the idea of adapting those strategies into interactive notebook style that I was seeing on a variety of websites in digital form and that s...

I first saw the concept of iterative design discussed in the book Invent to Learn  by Gary Stager and Sylvia Libow Martinez.  It didn't really sink in though until I was learning more about Minecraft and chatting with Minecraft experts on a MinecraftEDU Twitter chat.  The more I discovered about the concept, the more I realized it was exactly what I was missing in my makerspace project development.  For me, iterative design, or design thinking, helped to bring an element of mindfulness to creation.  It also helped to establish an expectation that our work can always evolve, and through that evolution we continue to grow as learners. Overview I saw a need to create a model that would work for elementary students K-5, and wanted to give a nod to the work of Martinez and Stager, who kept it simple, and work the work of Mitchel Resnick, discussed by Martinez and Stager in their book.  Resnick's hit on a cyclical model of imagining that really app...