Archive for 'Professional Development'

Just in time – notes from this morning’s #TTSed breakfast

This morning I shared breakfast with some teachers. We shared our experiences with using Google Docs in the classroom, Teacher Dashboard and BYOD. I was able to share a few ideas and I told them that I’d email them some notes. I changed my mind: I’ve decided to blog the ideas. BYOD: – check that […]

Guest Post: SAMR and me

SAMR was such a new concept to me I decided to ignore it. I’ve been out of the classroom for a while. I didn’t understand it and it seemed too removed from what I was doing in the classroom. But I found myself wanting to get the students to use their devices to their full potential. I […]

The Classroom as a Dinner Party

Recently I’ve begun to see everything within a food metaphor – this all started with my Learning Is A Banquet post. Can we go a  little deeper? What if teacher were the hosts of a pot luck dinner party and the students were the guests? If guests show up with nothing to contribute, they’re still welcome. […]

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Learning is a Banquet, not a Soup Kitchen

Teaching used to be about knowledge distribution. “I’ll show you this knowledge today. Tomorrow, I’ll build on that and share some more knowledge…” The teacher was the source of knowledge. Teachers controlled the flow, quality and timing of knowledge. The student was the grateful recipient. There were many structures in place to support this idea: […]

Kodu game lab “see how they run!”

I’ve been looking at Kodu Game lab with my Year 8 Technology Classes. Kodu is an app where students create their own games. There’s some great programming and creativity going on, but the main thing that excites me is how little instruction I need to give. Every student is really just working it out by […]

Top tips for Microsoft Outlook

Another Learning Over Lunch (LOL!) session today. We talked about Outlook this time – again, great questions and interesting conversations. What is Outlook actually? Outlook is the front end of a Microsoft service called Exchange. Outlook is an application that provides all of the elements below in one package: Email (also accessible at outlook.com) Calendar(s) […]

Top 5 tips for using The Internet

Yesterday, I spent my lunchtime with a few teachers and support staff talking about the Internet. It was great to see such a good turnout and some insightful questions were asked. My talk drew heavily from this post with a few other ideas thrown in. Make friends with search tools The most common setting I […]

A fiery BYOD Meeting

I attended an info evening put on by my local primary school on their new BYOD initiative last night. While there were some supportive parents there, the night was dominated by complaint – and it was hard to watch. I wanted to outline a couple of myths and realities. Please, if you disagree, that’s what […]

Music Technology Course – awesome turn out

I’m spending the day with 20 awesome music teachers from through the north island. This is fun.