Practice What You Preach

One of the big buzz words for education lately has been collaboration. We want students to work together. The 21^ST century worker won't be plugging along by themselves at a workstation, they will be working with a team to accomplish a goal or solve a problem. So we need to train our students to work together.

The irony is we don't practice what we preach. Teachers are very territorial when it comes to their teaching methods. “Don't come in my room, and don't copy my lesson plan.” It makes no sense. You don't get paid any less or any more for sharing. You don't look bad if someone else uses your work. If anything, your work inspired others. If we truly are doing all we can for the kids, then we would be doing everything possible to better ourselves and everyone around us, and that means sharing.

So I'm putting my money where my mouth is. Here's my OneNote Technology Curriculum Notebook. It has all my lessons, and links to online resources for anything you need. I've built these lessons from teachers who were generous enough to share them with the world, so I'm paying it forward.

Use anything you want from it. Enjoy.

My tech lesson when the internet is down

You have a great lesson planned for today, and the internet is down. Your supervisor is lurking in the doorway, you can just smell the observation coming. What do you do?

You teach your kids how to create hyperlinks with just PowerPoint or Google Slides!

Here’s my plan.

Begin the lesson with having the students create the first slide, a “Table of Contents” sort of slide. Mine looks like this.

Here's the basic slideshow to start with. 

This can be a template that you send them 

or make them create it themselves.

Instruct them to then create the rest of the slides, adding information about themselves. I like this lesson towards the beginning of the year so I can get to know my students quicker.

Choose the correct slide to link each bullet point.

I model how they then highlight the text “Where I was Born” and choose Insert-Hyperlink. They link it to the slide titled “Where I was Born.” I model another one, but most kids get it and finish the rest of the links themselves.

This is great, but it only links them out to the slide, not back to the homepage. So to complete the project I have them create a Home link button on one of the slides, insert the hyperlink to the TOC page, and then copy and paste it to the rest of the slides.

Insert-Autoshape to create the Home Button.

This explains how hyperlinks work, and how a website can be built, all without the internet.

It works well for me, and I hope it helps you out too.

I'm a certified bilingual nerd

I recently earned my Google Level 2 Certification, and it felt great, but I'm just as proud earning my Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert Badge for this year too. I like to say that I'm bilingual: I speak Google and Office. Both prove I met certain requirements, but they proved it in different ways.

You can earn your Google Certification anytime you want, just pay the $25 and you have three hours to complete the test.

The MIE Badge is only awarded once a year so you have a long time to complete the tasks, but if you miss the deadline you’re out of luck. I submitted my application 15 minutes before the midnight deadline, cause I’m organized and efficient. I knew about the deadline for MONTHS, yet there I am cramming like it’s a final for a class. I’ll never change.

The Google Test is a bunch of multiple choice questions and a pile of specific tasks you need to complete. Get enough correct, and you’re in. Don’t assume this test is easy-it’s not. You may be great at some Google products, but you need to know enough about ALL of them to pass. Google does provide all sorts of study materials and sample questions to prepare for the test, so if you do your homework you can pass it. I didn’t pass Level 2 the first time, you can read about my humiliation here.

Microsoft has a bunch of courses that you can take, just complete a certain amount of them. You watch videos, or complete interactive tasks, and there’s usually a short quiz at the end. The quiz will tell you whether you got the questions right or wrong as you go, and you can retake the quizzes if you don’t pass the first time. There’s over 100 different courses and badges you can earn along the way. The final piece for their certification is to create a two-minute video or Sway on how this process has influenced you and how you will implement what you’ve learned in your classroom.

Both methods of assessment were effective in their own way. I proved I can do specific tasks and had specific knowledge of Google products, but Microsoft just wanted to make sure I knew about all the things that were available to me and how I can be a better 21^st century teacher for my students. I only really had to prove what I knew by creating a Sway, which are very cool things, by the way.

The Google test gives you the results within seconds, the longest few seconds of your life.

The Microsoft results were released a month after the deadline.

The Google Badge email shows up a day later, the Microsoft Badge shows up with the congratulations email.

The Google Certification is a personal thing, you earn it for your own gratification.  

The Microsoft Badge is a global event. If you are connected to Microsoft in any of the many social media ways you can be, you will see that people in India, Germany and Mexico got their badges the same day you did. It made this planet feel a lot smaller seeing proud teachers from all around the world showing off the same badge as you.

So, I have my nerd cred from both Google and Microsoft. I learned a lot from both processes, and I am a much better teacher for it. It’s vital that teachers remain students, it’s the only way we learn.

What I've learned from tiny little dictators

These North Korean officers are standing there proudly and why shouldn't they? They're wearing enough bling on their uniforms to set off metal detectors.
If you notice along the side of my blog, I've got some micro-credentials: Google, Microsoft, CommonSense, etc. I'm proud of the work I've done to earn them and to display the badges on my blog. I realize that my students should get the same opportunities. Technology class grades are usually not a big deal on report cards, so I have to make them a big deal in my room.
I have some graphic design experience, so I created some badges for my students. When they finished certain modules online, or mastered a unit of work, I've created a badge for it. Google Classroom makes it easy to email just those students I select, and I send them a congratulations email with the badge linked to it. I tell them to post their badge to their blog, and it gets the rest of the class racing to see how fast they can get one too.

Learning something new should be it's own reward, but sometimes it's nice to show off a little.
We're all still looking for little gold stars.

Not staying in your lane.

My students, like every adolescent, have their phones in their hands all day. They are in constant contact with their friends, and don't miss an opportunity to take pictures of themselves or their lunch. To the adults around them they may seem very tech-savvy, but the adults should know better. The kids certainly know how to use Instagram and Snapchat, but they don’t know how to insert a picture into a Word document without screwing up the whole page. They stay in their lane.

I thought I would someday be out of a job because the kids would just naturally learn everything before they got to me, but it’s still not happening. They get to sixth grade still not even knowing how to double space a paragraph or create a simple chart. These aren’t highbrow skills; these are tasks that they will need to know how to do. They will need to present their knowledge in ways to efficiently communicate their thoughts, and it’s my job to show them the best possible way.

What I teach rounds out their technology knowledge, heck, its most of their technology knowledge. My job is to take them out of their safe lane and teach them how to drive in all the lanes, even the fast ones. They will work at jobs that haven’t been invented yet, so I need to teach them skills for those jobs. I owe them my best efforts, and I need to teach skills that are creative and effective.

I take my responsibilities seriously and I’m honored to have this task.

My first ISTE

The last day of school was Friday, June 25. I was on my way to Philadelphia at 6am Saturday morning. So my head was already spinning before I even got there. ISTE is the major educational technology trade show that everyone talks about all year, and this was my first trip there. Microsoft paid for my hotel and travel expenses because I became certified in Microsoft Education, which was very cool. My head continued to spin for the next three days. It was great.
I took a lot away with me from the experience. There are many people doing incredible things with technology, and I want to know it all. I found that this is impossible, but I can get closer to that goal by at least being around them.
I advanced what I know about coding and I learned entirely new things. I want to do more programming with my students so I went to the presentation that a group in New Jersey have developed to teach girls how to code. I'm thinking about adding Minecraft to my curriculum, so I saw an amazing teacher from Hawaii show us the things he's doing with his students with it.
Graphite is a great resource, and they sponsored a bowling party where I hung around with other teachers and we couldn't talk fast enough about all the things we do in our classrooms.
The three days flew by and I was exhausted but thrilled. I was inspired by what I saw, and overwhelmed by it all. I can't wait to go again next year.

I'm just trying to keep up.

Sometimes it's hard to be a technology teacher.
Students don't know more about math than the math teacher. They certainly don't know more about science or history. That's not the case with technology. In some cases, they know more than us and we are assigned to teach them something.
What we mostly do is find out where they are, and try to keep up. We think we're so groovy because we're on Facebook. Well guess what? If you haven't noticed, they're not even on there anymore. They've moved onto Instagram and Snapchat. By the time we join those sites, they will leave us in the dust.
What we can do is address the bigger picture. Yes, they are all over the internet, but doing what? What kind of content are they adding? What type of footprint are they leaving behind? We need to use social media guidelines to enlighten them on future issues they aren't thinking about now.
What I think is being ignored is mastering basic office skills, even adults don't know how to set up tabs, and forget about editing a master slide.

Mostly we learn together, finding new things to explore everyday. I am constantly trying to keep my curriculum interesting and relevant, and teach them something they don't know already. That becomes more of a challenge everyday because I don't know it yet either.

Our job may be more fun but our curriculum has to change constantly, and keeping up is hard work.

Don't do it Microsoft!

Microsoft just announced that it will discontinue clip art in it's products and I'm in mourning. Those trusty graphics have always been a simple and lovely way to brighten up any page, slide, or spreadsheet. Now you will be sent to Bing to search online for graphics. I have three big problems with this.

1. When little people are using these programs at first, having a simple way to insert art is not as overwhelming as searching online for appropriate artwork. Young children need some guidelines, and releasing them into the big bad internet to find artwork will create a time-wasting experience for them.
2. You're encouraging copyright infringement. Students will not concern themselves with where they got the artwork, and that's not the way to teach responsible digital citizenship. 
3. When your internet is down, you're out of luck. My students don't always have internet access, through no fault of their own. Providing a feature and then taking it away is not cool-period.

Technology develops by providing more features, not less. I have to go now, I need to start hoarding all the clipart before it disappears forever.

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/21330/20141203/microsoft-announces-death-of-clip-art-say-hello-to-bing-image-search.htm