Learning in Progress

  This post or iginally appeared on FTISE dTech Math makes me nervous. And, not your run of the mill, mild, tingle in your belly kind of nervous. It's the kind of nervous that literally initiates the fight or flight response, where every neuron is on edge, skin feels prickly to the touch and a waterfall of tears is being held back by not even a shred of willpower: I t's the kind of nervous that shuts a learner totally down.     Needless to say when I wrote a grant for a 3D printer last year, I wasn't thinking that I would actually have to use math to use it.  I mean, my general plan was that the kids would figure out how to use it, and I would just cheer them on, and probably tweet about the cool stuff they were doing.  And then it became apparent that I had to learn how to use it. For real use it. As a last minute challenge, one of our district technicians, Andrew, talked me into meeting him and Michelle, one of our second grade teachers after sc...

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...

This post originally appeared on FTISEdTech The elementary "Digital Conversion" is well underway, and now that we have a semester under our belt, it's time to think about modifying lessons to include a mindful integration of technology that capitalizes on teaching and learning strategies that we know work.   Teachers have worked really hard to give students a chance to try out new apps, strategies and approaches, and now that students have some skills, we can start to consider our own technology tool-kits as compared to our traditional instructional toolkit and find a way to join those things together.   Below is a Thinglink that highlights Marzano High Yield Strategies that we have been using for years, and suggests ways you can use technology to supplement for standard paper/pencil based learning.  While most of these may fall into the "Substitution" or "Augmentation" levels of SAMR , they are strategies that have been proven to benefit studen...

This post originally appeared on the FTISEdtech blog as an introduction to new makerspace materials available for teachers.