Taking A Tech Walk

Thanks to Andrew who showed me how to save my Google Slide presentation as a PDF with speaker notes. The next thing I need to learn is how to embed it into my blog so you can see it without clicking on the link. I welcome tips and feedback! LINK

Summary of Critiques LINK. After struggling with Padlet for quite a while, I think I have a working document to share on the critiques of the book I reviewed for this week, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in A Digital Age. Please let me know if you have any trouble accessing it. Also, if anyone can help me learn how to embed it so it is visible on the blog without needing the link, I'd be grateful for your advice. Thanks!  Prediction Podcast LINK Book Review Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age . Turkle, S. New York: Penguin Press, 2015,  436 pages, $18.00, ISBN 9780143109792 At the dinner table, parents are checking emails on their phones while their children fight to get their  attention. At work, employees hunch over their computers with headphones on and email their  colleagues at the next desk. In class, students check Facebook and shop for shoes. A woman, out on  a date, goes to the bathroom to check who else has swiped righ

I have had the good fortune to work in several schools with different professional learning models and  opportunities. One school provided a set amount of money that you could use for your professional  learning purposes. You could travel to conferences and workshops or you could take an online course  or purchase resources that met your professional learning goals. The school was quite remote and far  from the rest of the world and it was often necessary to combine two or three years’ worth of allowance  to attend one conference. When you returned from the trip, you were expected to share your learning  with the staff. This method allows for the teacher to pursue what they are most interested in but ends up  being a bit disjointed as staff members veer off into many different directions. Two schools I have worked  in have allocated time, usually once a month, for staff to form small learning communities to pursue a  topic of interest. At the end of the year, each group share

As a teacher, slight technology skeptic and linear thinker, I find the SAMR model to be most compelling.  To me it provides the scaffolding I need to begin to integrate and incorporate technology into my  classroom. I believe that when I use technology in my classroom, I am mostly in the substitution phase,  replacing pen and paper with google docs for typing up published pieces of writing or providing resources  for students to access at home through our online learning platform as part of a flipped classroom  strategy. I wonder if using Brainpop, Scholastic Study Jams and other similar websites for video content to add  a visual component to the learning, puts me in the augmentation phase. For a refugee unit, the  technology specialist and I created a shared google doc for pairs of students to use as a reflection too.  They each watched a video, read a linked article and followed a virtual reality piece on refugees  and then reflected on these three resources. They then