Saturday, November 29, 2014

Howard Gardner: Five Minds for the Future

Grant Wiggins - Understanding by Design

Here is two videos on Understanding by Design.

(Part 1)



(Part 2)

What is an essential question?

Lesson on characteristics of essential questions adapted from Essential Questions Opening Doors to Student Understanding by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins

SMART amp Overview

An overview on SMART amp.






(SMART amp) This video will show you how it works

SMART amp©, the newest product offering from SMART Technologies, is a web-based platform designed to connect different devices to a single, collaborative workspace. In this webinar, you'll see how teachers can easily distribute lesson materials to students, conduct formative assessment to gauge student understanding of concepts, and manage student projects, all in real-time. You'll also find out exactly what you'll need to get up-and-running with amp, and how Teq is prepared to support you along the way. Whether you've purchased SMART amp and you're ready to get started now, or you're simply investigating solutions for increased collaboration in an environment with multiple devices, we're excited to share the possibilities that SMART amp provides.

Will you need your own K-12 Data Center in your school in the future, Possibly not.

This video will talk about how Google cloud and how it stands to change your data center.

Will you need a data center into the future, I think not. With either Amazon AWS or Google Cloud you will no longer need a data center. Can you do this today? Not yet be very soon. It is in Beta currently. With in about 20 Seconds you will be able to spin up a Windows VM server in the cloud and you are off to the races. The other cool thing about this is that you will only pay for what you use so you don't have to over build your data center. You will instead Scale it as you need more CPU, Memory, or Storage Space.

Link to the: CBT Nugget video on what this will look like.

Thursday, November 27, 2014

The Candle Problem

We explore the candle problem and uncover the implications it has on the way organizations motivate their employees to tackle complex and creative tasks. Enjoy!






Daniel Pink - Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose

A key to engaging students in there own learning.



TEDxNYED - Alan November - 03/05/2011

Alan November is recognized internationally as a leader in education technology. He began his career as an oceanography teacher and dorm counselor at an island reform school for boys in Boston Harbor. He has been a director of an alternative high school, computer coordinator, technology consultant, and university lecturer. As practitioner, designer, and author, Alan has guided schools, government organizations and industry leaders as they plan to improve quality with technology.

Quote about Alan November

“As an educator, sometimes all you need is inspiration to work harder for your students. Alan November provides that.”

Sarah Smith, Fourth Grade Teacher, MI
http://novemberlearning.com/educational-services/educational-consultants/alan-november/

Guiding principles for learning in the 21st century

Is Technology making a difference in education?


“It may be that we need to turn to new ways of conceptualizing the role of technology in the classroom—conceptualizations that do not assume the computer will provide direct instruction to students, but instead will serve to create new opportunities for both learning and teaching,” Enyedy concludes.

Full Article: http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2014/11/Personalized-instruction

Department of Education: 21st Century Learning

Various officials in the Department of Education, as well as Superintendents, discuss the need for transitioning districts, schools, teachers, and classrooms to be prepared for 21st century learning. This includes equity in access to these 21st century learning necessities.



Connected Educators Month 2014



Richard Culatta, Director of the Office of Educational Technology, discusses the importance of being a connected educator.





Department of Education: 21st Century Learning



Various officials in the Department of Education, as well as Superintendents, discuss the need for transitioning districts, schools, teachers, and classrooms to be prepared for 21st century learning. This includes equity in access to these 21st century learning necessities.


Connected Educators

Interview with educators about the importance of being "connected" in order to be an effective teachers and leaders. Video was created as part of Connected Educators Month



Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Synergyse Blog: Synergyse launches free interactive training for Google Classroom

Do you need free training for your teacher for Google Classrooms? If so here is a good tool to help train your teaching staff. This tool is interactive and guides the user in there own account. This tool is also free for Google Admin console. There is also a tool for GAFE apps. It is very reasonable priced at $10.00 per full time Teacher and the students are free.



Check it out today.



Synergyse Blog: Synergyse launches free interactive training for Google Classroom

Friday, November 21, 2014

Living in beta: Molly Schroeder at TEDxBurnsvilleED

How to present students with a new way of learning. How to create a class that only has one question for the whole quarter. But this question is not one that they will not be able to just Google the answer. We need to create a culture of learning is about Thinking, Making, and Learning.



Sunday, November 16, 2014

How the Maker Movement Connects Students to Engineering and Technology

Maker Movement and how students can take control of there learning.



Embedding Assessment Throughout the Project (Keys to PBL Series Part 5)

Checking for understanding with simple assessment and feedback.



Blended Learning: Working With One iPad

An example of how you can teach with just one ipad if you are not one to one.

ClassDojo: Teach what matters most.

EdTech Moment 53: Air Parrot

Using AirParrot to mirror your pc to your Apple TV

How to hook a chromebook to an Apple TV unit to Mirror your Chromebook Screen using AirParrot.



Chromecasting in a Chromebook 1:1 Classroom

How to use a chromebook to chromecast for your classroom.



Projecting With Your Chromebook

Use your projector to model lessons on the Chromebook.



Collaborative Learning Techniques

So you want to find some new techniques to use in your classroom. These videos are a short series of videos to help give you good ideas on how to change the way that you can deliver your instruction to help engage and help student to become collaborators.

Click the PLAYLIST in the upper left corner to navigate to the topic that you would like to learn more about.




Remake Your Class Part 3: Exploring a Collaborative Learning Environment

Remake Your Class Part 2: Building a Collaborative Learning Environment

Part #2






Remake Your Class Part 1: Planning for a Collaborative Learning Environment

Visit http://www.edutopia.org/remake for more tips and resources! Edutopia's three-part series follows a determined teacher at Roosevelt Middle School in San Francisco as he transforms his crowded classroom space to enable deeper learning. In Part 1, Mr. Mattice and the designers from The Third Teacher Plus figure out what's working and what's not. 



SMART amp™ collaborative learning software

Discover how you can inspire amazing in your classroom with this revolutionary new cloud-based software from SMART.

Saturday, November 15, 2014

What AWS is and how could it change the school data center

Five years from now, will you have a data center in our school. If not this will change the way that we function. There is a lot of mind sets that need to change for us to get here. We need to get a comfort level to the security of online data centers and to make sure that our internet connections that we have are solid. But this does change the way we may think and our strategies we will use in the future.




Sunday, November 9, 2014

The four steps to success Think Big, Start Small, Fail Fast, Succeeded

The four steps to success
Think Big, Start Small, Fail Fast, Succeeded

Article: from Huffington post,

If we took this approach in education we would create an environment for success.

Step One: Think Big

This is pretty self-explanatory. Few people start out with a mediocre vision or a plan to build a tiny business. Thinking big allows people to free themselves from constraints and get as many great ideas, including internet marketing ideas, on the table. It also serves to get people excited and engaged in a new idea. That said, there’s a difference between thinking big and pursuing pie in the sky ideas. That gets us to our next step.

Step Two: Start Small

I once met a guy who wanted to revolutionize the study aid industry by changing the way that content was created, marketed, consumed, and purchased. He wasn’t alone in his view, but he was pretty uniquely positioned to get something done. He’d been in the industry for decades and knew it inside and out. He wanted to raise a few million dollars to launch a new venture. He clearly was thinking big.

When I asked him what inspired the idea, he told me his former employer had just discontinued selling a series of very successful Advanced Placement (AP) study books for high school students and reverted copyright to the authors. After a bit of discussion, I learned that he could buy out those copyrights and sell secure PDF copies of these books on Amazon for a few thousand dollars and test the waters.

That wasn’t big enough for him. A year later, someone had started even smaller—buying warehouses full of printed materials and liquidating them on eBay, generating a few hundred thousand dollars in sales—while this guy I met was still looking for funding.

There’s no shame in starting small. No big successful company ever started out that way.

Step Three: Fail Fast

It’s a cold, hard fact that failure and hardship are the means by which people learn and grow. Failure teaches us what not to do and hardship allows us to truly value the rewards we earn. The beauty of starting small is that our failures are then equally small. The key here is to understand when an experiment has run its course, cut bait and move on. Small failures are easier to walk away from as there’s often less of an emotional desire to “turn things around” or throw good money after bad. The goal is not to succeed the first, second, or third time but to identify ten or twenty things that might work and then cycle through them as quickly as possible. Think of it as A/B split testing for a new venture.

Step Four: Succeed

This isn’t meant to be funny; very few ventures succeed in their first iteration. Success is a process of trial and error. The key to success is longevity, and unless you’ve got a bottomless pit of money (or an unlimited corporate budget), you’ll need to stretch your resources as far as possible.

In my own travels, I’ve had more than my fair share of clients who have turned to me after having dumped enough money to buy a house into a failed digital venture. In many cases, my clients believed that they had a flawed strategy or a bad idea. In most cases, it was more about execution.

Sometimes people are shocked to hear that a few free web services and a five page micro site can serve as a pretty good internet marketing starting point for a new venture. Consumer grade web services may not be scalable, but until you know that your venture will succeed, what’s there to scale?

President Obama asks America to learn computer science

President Obama asks America to learn computer science

Mitch Resnick: Let's teach kids to code

JOIN THE LARGEST LEARNING EVENT IN HISTORY, DEC 8-14, 2014

The Hour of Code - WORLDWIDE

Last year hundreds of organizations joined together to create fun introductions to programming for all to learn. This year the goal is to get 100 million participants from all across the globe. Learn more at


 http://hourofcode.com/



Thursday, November 6, 2014