I love a truly well-crafted message. With movies, we watch a story unfold, and ideally, it captures our interest so that we are curious/excited/intrigued as to what happens next. A good educational video does the same thing, setting a stage for making a point that can help a child see something that was hidden from her or his understanding before. In this piece, we meet a beggar on... More →
As educators, we are constantly making a difference in the lives of our students. Those differences may be small - seeds planted that flower into something important years later. Sometimes, though, the difference is powerfully immediate. This video is the story of The Apollos, a group of students from Oakland Technical High School who in 1979 were key in getting California to pass a law creating a holiday celebrating the life... More →
I do a lot of traveling and speaking, with my primary goal to help teachers see new possibilities for themselves and their students. This includes looking at new technologies from a variety of perspectives, telling stories of amazing things that the teachers and students I meet have done, and showing videos that help me make a point about vision and action. My hope is that this post (and perhaps more... More →
Yesterday I posted a piece about how we see limitations in our students, and this morning, a friend pointed me to a new and impressive video from Dove called Real Beauty Sketches. This is a thought-provoking piece that calls into question both how we see others and how we see ourselves. In the video, an artist who can't see his subjects sketches them according to their descriptions of themselves,... More →
In another post on this site, I highlighted the TED app for Android, and am returning to that app to talk about ways we think about our students. Do we know what they can do? More to the point, do we know how our thinking can limit what we see of what they can do? A friend asked me recently this question, "What's the coolest thing you've seen... More →
Google Drive allows students to write collaboratively. This falls in the Big Whopping Deal category, as students tend to be far more interested in producing higher quality work when the audience expands beyond the teacher. Student work can be reviewed, commented on, and discussed by peers in order to improve it before "turning in" the final draft to the teacher. In Part 1, I described an approach to keeping... More →
Many teachers love the collaborative nature of documents in the Google Drive system, but have difficulties keeping what is shared with them organized. I have some recommendations on how to handle that, and hope this will help you take advantage of all that collaborative documents make possible. Note that if you are brand new to Google Drive, this post may be confusing. I am assuming an understanding of... More →
I should start by making it clear I know Karen and Gene, the two gifted educators that write the Common Core and Educational Technology blog. They were part of the 2011 cohort of the MERIT program which I directed, and so I can say without any hint of subjectivity that they're amazing people. So what have they done? They have launched a blog in which strong educational technology resources are... More →
So you're a teacher putting together a video or a slideshow, and you want to add some music. What's okay to use? The rules surrounding copyright are complex, but help is out there. You can find all kinds of good music you can use. Legally. For free. You just need to know where, and how, to look. Let's start by assuming that you want to be able... More →
Having a tablet or other mobile device that may well be handed among several students as part of an activity can cause problems if the students have multiple accounts they need to access. Imagine, for example, that three students in a group will use one device, and each has a GAFE (Google Apps for Education) account. How do they access their accounts without stepping into each others' mail, files, etc.? ... More →
_80_80_s_c1.jpg)
Ask a 6th grader how many different jobs there are, and you might get, "Well there's (what my mom does), (what my dad does), teacher, police officer, football player, movie star, and the president of the United States. Did I get them all?" Hopefully not, but more to the point, there are remarkably few opportunities in most curricula to explore lots of different careers in any kind of efficient... More →
_80_80_s_c1.jpg){kind=icon}
One app that comes with your machine is Movie Studio (please excuse my busy background). If you're looking for the Xperia equivalent of Premiere, this ain't it. That said, if you need a quick way to bring together a few clips, pictures, and music, Movie Studio can do the job. The app allows adding any of the items mentioned above, as well as taking pictures and video from... More →
Many teachers are oppressed, more than anything else, by time. Is everything ready for tomorrow? Is the grading done? Will I ever get a full night's sleep again? Saving time to be inspired, though, is what can provide the energy not just to keep going, but to enjoy it as you do, and a great source of inspiration comes via the TED app from TED Conferences (when searching, you... More →