First of all, I have to thank my friend, Kim Sivick for sharing this awesome gadget with me. ————————————————————————————————————————————– Today I received my Makey Makey kit in the mail and I haven’t stopped playing with it. First, I opened the box. Once I had it all plugged in, I immediately got some bananas and got [...]
I just finished reading the 2nd edition of Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works, a guide for educators who already are familiar with Classroom Instruction that Works. I must confess, I haven’t read Classroom Instruction that Works (it’s been on my to-read list forever), so while I was familiar with many of the strategies in the book, [...]
This past summer, with the help of my brilliant friend, Kristen Swanson, I took my Technology Curriculum to a place I had never imagined it could go. As a computer lab teacher, there has never been an easy to follow, mapped out path for instruction. As such, over the last 5 years I created a [...]
The more I read about school reform here in Philadelphia, the more it feels like an episode of the Food Network show, Restaurant Impossible. For those who have never seen it, picture a professional restauranteur swooping in to turnaround a failing restaurant with his years of experience and no-nonsense attitude. The changes that the host, [...]
I recently attended the annual ISTE conference in San Diego to participate on a panel about new teacher mentoring using technology moderated by my colleague, Lisa Dabbs. As I considered my responses to some of the panelist questions, I remembered a conversation I had at the Sunday night networking event for the conference with a [...]
This week’s City Paper cover story, Money Talks by Daniel Denvir, has gathered a lot of attention. The article explores the financial reach of the William Penn Foundation in the current reform plans being discussed for the school district. While a lot of the facts in the article were nothing new to me, a few [...]
In their inspiring book, Walk Out Walk On, Deborah Frieze and Meg Wheatley take their readers on a journey across the world, engaging with various groups of people working together to build agency where there isn’t any and growing self-reliant communities that defy stereotypes. So many of their stories are reminiscent of the work that [...]
This year my 2nd graders completed a research project about African American Athletes using videos from History.com and a public Google Docs presentation. The students worked in self-selected pairs and picked an athlete’s name out of a ‘hat’ (it was actually a plastic beach bucket!). Over the next few weeks, they listened to the videos [...]
It feels like forever since I have been to an edcamp, though I have virtually attended a few through following hashtags and the opportunity to Skype into edcampMKE with some of my colleagues. I have been more and more energized by conversations around teacher leadership, meaningful professional development. The edcamp movement has been growing, with [...]
I maintain a blog with Edutopia about Technology Integration in the Elementary grades. You can read it here
