The origins of SSS began in April of 2014 as I began to embark on making a “game a week.” Rami Ismail of Vlambeer had recently written about the topic so it was fresh in my mind. I too am a proponent of it creating a breadth of work because only through practice can you become…
The transformation spans hardware (thinner, lighter, smaller, cheaper, longer battery life, instant on/off, touch, sensors, connectivity, etc.), operating systems (more: secure, reliable, maintainable, robust, etc.), and app software (refactored, renewed, reimagined, etc.). It is the combination of these attributes, however, causing a change as fundamental as the leap from mainframe to workstation, from character-based to…
I fired up Google Slides yesterday like I do every day and was greeted with a new feature, Presenter View: I have already used Presenter View, but the Accept audience questions option had me intrigued. Starting Presenter View Presenter View is still not as polished as it is in Keynote or Powerpoint, but it does get the job done….
Audiobooks are a valid listening component, providing rich exposure to sophisticated spoken words in school and at home. We’ve seen evidence of this in the work we do at Tales2go, but wanted to be more rigorous in our approach and have data to support our argument. We contracted with WestEd, a leading educational research nonprofit,…
Amid a flurry of interest in the latest panacea for student disengagement, a recent CNN report asked, Is personalized learning the future of school? The report, based upon a $133 million school startup known as AltSchool, is a response to a legitimate concern identified by former Google executive, Max Ventilla. The ambition to make the…
Being an Mac school, we have use iPhoto (now Photos) a lot to manage all of the photos collected during the school year. But, now that Google offers unlimited storage of photos (it resizes the photos to 2048×2048 for non-Google Apps for Education Users) it makes sense to move photo storage to Google Photos. Getting…
So many of these tools are new to me. It is amazing how I use them every single day. Here’s what I’m using all the time in my classroom right now. Source: 36 Edtech Tools I’m Using Right Now in My Classroom and Life @coolcatteacher This is such a great list of tools and apps,…
#LearningIs making | Learning with ‘e’s Learning where children create meaningful products, Nick said, is a more powerful way of learning, because they need to negotiate the problems and challenges as they develop their skills to make. This echoes the work of Seymour Papert who argued that the best kinds of learning occur when children…
Scratch is a great introduction to programming. By using code blocks, students and staff can quickly assemble a working program. But, the limitations of Scratch become more and more apparent as you try to create more sophisticated programs. That’s where Pico-8 from Lexaloffle comes in. Pico-8 – the programmable virtual game console The Pico-8 is a…
4 Reasons That Technology Might Not Be Helping Them Learn – I know because I’m one of those “mistake-making teachers.” I’ve taught students of all ability-levels; I’m now serving as an instructional specialist in a 1:1 school district; I’m a parent of three amazing children who, like my students, have very different capacities for learning….