KKUATeach

Perhaps my biggest insight from this class is that technology and teaching has always been related and always will be. Whether it was the introduction of writing, printing, recording or the inter-web, new modes of communication always mean that teachers need to adapt. With this thought process, I realized ed-tech isn't limited to the Social Media world, but simply means teachers should use whatever they can to aid student learning. I chose to use Google Slides for my summary artifact for a couple reasons. This type of slide deck is a pretty common app to use to prepare for a class. Since I've always used PowerPoint in my previous career, I've been trying to get better at Slides so I can make my personal comparisons. Secondly, I wanted to explore how to embed the presentation in a blog. Looking forward, I plan to have some sort of home page for my classes. This will serve as a communication portal with the parents, but will also be a repository for teaching materials. If ...

SUMMARY Even though the last few posts came fast and furious, this has been a long journey for me.   Until I started thinking about how to summarize this project in terms of the class, I really didn’t think about how much tech is involved in anything. Let’s list different “tech” I used in this process. Laptop Mobile phone (including SMS) Many different WiFi’s NFHS learning management system US Lacrosse learning management system Twitter YouTube Microsoft OneDrive (cloud storage) Excel/Word Google Sheets Digital camcorder Portable projector Email Whiteboard Good old pencil and paper F2F (face to face) – the new-fangled way of saying talking to people Lacrosse game equipment Blogger After looking back and considering the different tools I used to help me be a better coach and hopefully make my kids be better players, I understand what the hell this assignment was all about. Teaching is about using whatever yo...

Film Study Wow, did I underestimate film study by a high school coach. There are two main areas I was not ready for at all. How Valuable It Is How Much Time It Takes Let’s discuss them in that order. I mentioned earlier that I was worried about making in game strategy adjustments. Since that is not my primary concern during the game, I do most of my strategy critiques after the game while watching film. Anytime I’ve watched lacrosse game films for the past 6 years I have only been worried about my sons. You look at things differently when you are looking at all the players than when you are only worrying about one or two (I know, the quote is a bit off. But it’s close. Give me a break!). After our fist scrimmage, I sat down with my laptop and a note book to compile notes to show the kids. Without making a big deal, I just went to the AV room off the locker room and started reviewing the films. Soon, players started coming in and I had them hooked. Being prepar...

For the sake of a narrative, I’m jumbling the time line a bit. This post will be more about my kids than me.  It’s funny – I naturally typed “my kids,” but I’m actually talking about the team. Last year we had a decent team. We finished in the middle of the pack, but due to a bunch of factors that will bore you, that was a pretty good result for the regular season. The team even earned a home playoff game that they won in OT. I’m tempted to say that my youngest son had a lot to do with the win because of a change in momentum that came with him creating a turnover, beating several players on a run down the field and scoring a goal that electrified the team and the crowd, but there’s no way I would brag on him so I won’t say it. The reward for that win was a trip to the #1 regional seed and a definitive butt-whooping, but the first game is what everybody remembers. This year, our team is disproportionately made up of underclassmen, but some of the older kids are causing a bit...

Ok, it’s been a while. Let me ‘splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. (If anybody reads this AND gets that, I’d love to hear it.) Last we left this thread, I was going into the first couple scrimmages for my team. I have been keeping notes all along on how this was going, but as I talked about way back in February , I have a tendency to worry about my writing so I was editing as I posted. So, while my last post on my coaching stuff was in early April and covered stuff that happened in early March, I still spent time rewriting the post instead of just putting it up. That worked well until both school and coaching got into full swing, so I got a bit behind in worddsmithing. Now I’m catching up. You’re going to see a few posts in the next few hours catching up about 6 weeks of stuff. Try to remember that time frame, please. First - I really wish I was better at remembering names. That is going to be such a big thing for me to work on as a teacher.   I don’t think I’l...

Today’s key topic “What is your philosophy on assessment?”   Well, actually, “What is my philosophy on assessment? I am certainly of the era that schools are all about assessment and ranking. Homework was graded and recorded. Pop quizzes would make sure kids were staying up on the material. Tests were long and covered a whole bunch of material. And of course, ALL THIS WENT ON YOUR PERMANENT RECORD! My first real thought of the differences between formative and summative assessments came while checking my kids grades online during their middle school years. I saw these different categories and thought, “Well, that’s different.” I didn’t spend a whole lot of time figuring out how much formatives went into their grades, since I was mainly concerned about the boys getting their homework done and turned in. But the concept of assessing to check progress just seemed natural to me. In the business world, this should be done all the time as a manager. I would meet with my direct...

I'm a bit late on this topic - things have been crazy with school and work. Sorry for the delay (He says to nobody in particular). This post is about the e-book topic in tech class. Mr. Jon Smith’s story about the use of e-books in a special education setting is objectively amazing. The question is, what caused that difference? It doesn’t take long watching the video we saw in class to know that Mr. Smith is a very engaging presenter. His passion to have students succeed academically seemed obvious. In this program, we’ve been taught several times that one of the best predictor of student achievement is whether they connect with a teacher. We can probably can point to this as a major cause of the success, but the question remains “What caused the turnaround?” I ask this because I’m guessing Mr. Smith was as devoted to his students before the e-book use as after. Did this new method change how the student’s connected with Mr. Smith or, maybe how they connected with academics ...

So, we’ve been asked to reflect on what to consider before implementing new tools into the classroom. One of the first things to consider (that actually fits into the TPACK model) is “Does this new technology add value to the learning process?”   Being an early adopter may be a good thing, but if you’re adopting just for the “cool” factor you may be diverting resources and wasting the students’ precious attention. Any tech you select should also be robust, supported and adopted. Imagine how frustrating it would be to have spent time integrating Google Glass into your lesson plan. Other considerations would be initial implementation costs, ongoing licensing and maintenance costs, privacy concerns, copyright issues and all the other things we’ve discussed earlier in the semester. So, with all these concerns, how do you select the right tech for your classroom. I guess the first thing is to start within the framework of the tech available to you in the district. Whether that will ...

I’ve just finished the first week on the field with the kids. It was quite the learning experience. One of the first things to figure out was how I was going to interact with Mike, the Head Coach.   Like I mentioned in my first post, I had plenty of interaction with Mike last year when he coached and I worked the scorer table. But that is completely different than coaching. Much of this week was spent with me figuring out what he wanted me to do and figuring out what is was OK for me to say to the kids. Like I mentioned last time, I spent my prep week documenting ways to teach a few rides and clears. Along with these, I found some help online to develop practice plans that brought these together in a series of drills that built upon each other. We did a couple of them the first few days and Mike asked me to introduce the drills and run them. My coach voice returned very quickly, and I found myself in the middle directing two groups of 20 kids each running the drills at...

Today I’m reviewing a photo editing tool, fotor, for my Cool Tool review. Unfortunately, this is the easiest review I’ve done. Right after we signed up for Cool Tools to review, I had a need for a photo editor. Thinking I’d be efficient, I figured I would try fotor out for my needs and for my review. To use the app on my laptop, I needed to download it. That’s when the trouble started. In addition to the photo editing app, I got a browser and a security app – neither which I knew was coming or agreed to. As far as I’m concerned, that’s dirty pool. The first thing I did when I noticed these extra apps was to uninstall fotor. After I did that, the app asked for feedback as to why I was giving it the boot.   I filled out the form and told them it was because I found these other programs and if it wasn’t because of them, they should let me know and I’d try again.   That was about 6 weeks ago. I haven’t heard yet so I’m going on the assumption that the extra programs on my devi...

This post will be about the different productivity tools I think I’ll be using in my classroom. The first will be some sort of desktop/laptop. With those tools, I can see myself using several applications and systems. Calendar – I currently use Google Calendar for keeping family activities straight, and I can see me creating a new calendar just for my classes. That will give me a way to keep track of events from major (testing, vacations etc.) to due dates of assignments. If I am in a school with Google Classroom, I can also share the calendar with my students so they can see important things. I would also consider an organization app like Wunderlist . Email – I can see that as being an important way of interacting with administration and parents. Google – In this class and others in the program, I’ve learned that there is a huge number of things out there to help teachers. From lesson plans to work sheets to class room activities, I plan to honor my previous career...

So, at the end of my last post, I had all my mandatory coaching training done, now I just have to wait until the paperwork gets through the school district and the state for my permit comes through. I have to wait until that is all done before contact with the team, so for now I’m focusing honing what I know about the mechanics and adding new drills and game play strategies to my toolbox. My first go-to for this is the US Lacrosse Coaches Education Program. As I already mentioned before, the Level 1 certification I hold focused on the basic techniques – how to teach a kid to pass, catch, shoot and pick up a ground ball. If you’ve ever watched a youth or developmental middle school game, you see how important it is to focus on the fundamentals of these particular tasks. The level 1 courses also gave me important lessons on how to teach the proper way for kids to hit – making sure we are playing a safe and controlled, yet physical, game of lacrosse without reverting to ...

This week, I’m reviewing a presentation Cool Tool called Slidestory. From their website, Slidestory is a way to create and share presentations .   At first, I thought this would be similar to Google Slides or Powerpoint, but it’s a bit different. What the product does it allow you to record your own narration over top of a series of picture files of your choice. Think being able to record a stereotypical “our vacation photos from an old-style carrousel slide projector” event. As I went to check this product out, three things jumped out at me. The first, the web site shows it’s a beta version. Beta software puts me on guard to start, so immediately I’m skeptical. In order to use it, you also need to create a free account. Now I’ve created accounts with several applications, but the Beta nature had me hesitate a bit more. Then, I noticed at the bottom of the page that you had to download a client application onto your own devices.   Now alarms are officially going off ...

Starting with the generic, Dr. Thornburg’s article on his theory of learning spaces made sense to me. .   While pondering (in my cave) about the video we watched in class , I started to realize the connection of the cave and the watering hole (our blogs in this case) are really helping my understanding of the material we all learning in this program. But there was something about the model, as presented in the video, that was bugging me. The first was how my mind looked at the three spaces and immediately thought of sequential steps, based on how the material was presented. Eventually I got through this by realizing the cave/watering hole stages intermix. The other problem I had went deeper. It seemed something was missing. As it turns out, so does Dr. Thornburg.  In the presented article, Dr. Thornburg adds the Lifespace to the initial model to deepen the understanding by doing. That brought it all together for me. Just in this program, we are exposed to the Life stage ...

There is one large difference in becoming a coach at the community youth level and high school varsity – bureaucracy. Youth activities rely so much on volunteers they are usually just happy to get anybody, let alone somebody who knows the game. I was certified in CPR/AED and First Aid through work, so I at least had that, although in the early years of the club they hadn’t started requiring those certificates. Before I can have contact with the high school kids, I need a valid Pupil Activity Permit from the Ohio Department of Education. There are some courses/certifications that were no brainers – First Aid, CPR and concussion awareness. A biggie, however, is the Fundamentals of Coaching through the National Federation of High Schools (NFHS).   This is a mandatory training and is available on-line through the NFHS learning portal ($65). This was a little bit different than the coaching basics I had for my US Lacrosse certification. Some of the new information is empha...

As anybody that has been in a classroom or business conference room in the last 10 years knows, many spaces in which somebody is presenting information have some sort projection technology installed. It may be an interactive white board, LCD projector or even the growing use of interactive LED flatscreens. (Interesting summary here on one analyst’s view of what’s going to happen to interactive whiteboards in North America over the next few years.) So instead of telling you what you already know about the importance and utility of some sort of presentation package, I’m going to instead do a bit of comparison between Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint. I’m going to leave Keynote and Prezi out of the comparison. I seldom dip into the Mac world, so I don’t know much about Apple’s presentation tool, Keynote, to help. The quick checks I found on Prezi seem to indicate it’s growing in use, but seems to lag the “big three” in use. Check out others comparisons here or h...