Information Technology Education

As a teacher, I definitely take pedagogy and content knowledge seriously as I plan learning experiences for my students.  But, as we all know, teaching is much more than that.  It involves thinking about how to motivate and engage my students, how to ignite their curiosity, and how to answer that deeper question of 'so what?'  or 'why am I learning this?' I had the opportunity to read the book Drive by Dan Pink recently and it was such an interesting experience.  It put into words what I somehow knew to be true intuitively as a teacher.  What drives or motivates people to do great, innovative things? Pink hones in on three words:  autonomy, mastery and purpose.  So, after reading this book, I find myself asking these questions: How am I providing opportunities for my students to have autonomy in their learning?  Do my students have the opportunity to engage in meaningful work that requires them time and hard work to master the skills that go into ...

I got inspired by this lesson on biomimicry found here.   Before getting into biomimicry, though, I had my students first explore nature right on our schoolyard by going out and taking pictures.  I registered the class for our first Project Noah mission - Global Schoolyard Bioblitz.  We then uploaded the pictures and made observations about the colors, structures, and functions of organisms. After this, we explored biomimicry through a few resources.  One of the videos is shown above. I then introduced the quest to the students:  How can we use reverse-engineering to learn from nature and innovate solutions? I reminded them of how we used reverse-engineering when taking apart a video game to figure out how it works.  They then went on to reverse-engineer a sunflower, taking it apart into its component part in order to get inspired by nature to come up with an innovative solution based on the color, structure, or function of the sunflower.  Their ideas...

I shared recently how I came to give my first Ignite talk at ISTE this past summer. It was such a valuable process to go through - to reflect on what is really important to say (or not to say), prioritize order of importance, organize information, strategically select images to best 'show' not tell my story, not to mention work on presentation skills. Since research, speaking and listening skills are such a huge part of what I do in this class, I thought to myself, what better way to target all of these through having my students plan, practice, and give an Ignite talk?  20 slides, 15 seconds each for each of them to tell their story.  I struggled with how to pitch it to my students and kept thinking - how will I get buy-in?  how can I model this for them and help them see the value in it?  I got the aha moment I was seeking last week. I decided to start off by giving my students the same Ignite talk I gave at ISTE this summer and shared all the challenges and fears ...

I've been working on ways to have my students explore and reflect on the importance of mindset in the classroom.  To this end, they took Jo Boaler's course called " How to Learn Math " last spring.  It was definitely a highlight for many of my students. Many had never realized the importance of having a growth mindset and to not be afraid of making mistakes.  It was a freeing and empowering moment for so many of them. Image  link I really got to thinking about I address standards and practices (mathematical practices and science and engineering practices) in the classroom, but what about mindset?  So, to start off the school year, I returned to a series of videos from IDEO that I watched when I took a Human-Centered Design course.  It's a set of seven videos addressing mindsets that we must have as we design solutions:  learn from failure iterate, iterate, iterate make it empathy creative confidence optimism embrace ambiguity They can be found here. ...

Starting a new school year, establishing safe and appropriate online behavior is always a priority for me as a middle school teacher.  I searched many options for my students and it was not an easy task. Many of the secondary digital citizenship games and interactive sites covered topics such as phishing with details that I did not want to bring into my class.  Many of the elementary sites, however, were too simplistic and my students needed more content.  So, I was thrilled when I found Common Sense Media's Digital Compass.  It was in an interactive game format that required students to made decisions as the characters went through their day.  Each character faced unique challenges from citing sources to facing peer pressures.  Opportunities to explore the pitfalls as well as the 'upside' of digital media are included, which makes for a great learning experience for all students. The Educator Guide is full of great ideas to extend and the content covered ...

It's back to school time and with that, comes lesson planning and looking for new things to try in the classroom.  I just realized the other day that everything I share on this blog has to do with half of my job which is as a middle school STEM teacher currently.  The other half of my job, though, is as a teacher-on-assignment to support K-6 teachers.  To this end, I have created a resource site called TeachCreateInnovate, I made it my goal to provide links to quality instructional material.  I also included links to numerous STEM competitions and tech tools that they might find useful to integrate into their classrooms.   Here 's the link to this site:

Back in the spring, I was asked to direct a STEM summer academy.  I was thrilled to have the opportunity to create a summer experience for grades 4-8 learners that would be the best STEM experience they could ever have!  As I was brainstorming ideas, I decided it would have to be all about the kids having a maker experience in every sense of the word - three strands all centered on making and creating. 1)  Code-makers:  Here, the students used Google CS-First and App Inventor to create games and apps.  They engaged in pair-programming and had a lot of fun 'making' with code. 2)  STEM-makers:  In this strand, the students created using science, technology, engineering, and math.  The room was full of "junk" that they used to make Rube Goldberg devices.  They had Ozobot and Sphero challenges.  For Ozobot, they had to design the longest course in black marker on an 8.5 x 11 inch size sheet of paper.  Then, they ran their ozobots on t...