Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Category: apple

  • Daily Dedication, Check-In Question, and Selfie-Bingo

    One of the things I love about teaching at an independent school is the opportunity to have “advisory time.” At my North Carolina school, I’m a seventh grade advisor again this year, and we have an hour after lunch for advisory every third school day. Today was our third advisory meeting of the year, and…

  • Import Blackbaud Class Calendar to Google Calendar

    Today I created a revised version of a video tutorial I created in August 2021 and shared in the post, “Import Class Schedule Into Google Calendar.” Our school uses “Blackbaud” as our student information system (SIS), but our teaching schedules are not automatically synced with Google Calendar. As I mentioned at the end of this…

  • Harry Potter Style Live Photo Albums

    Shelly and I love watching our photo memories with our kids and family, as well as now just with our dogs (as “empty nesters”) on our living room television as well as our kitchen Google Nest Hub. I wrote about this a couple weeks ago in the post, “Digital Picture Frames.” This weekend we’ve had…

  • Digital Picture Frames

    My wife and I derive considerable pleasure these days from watching a variety of old family photos on our living room TV, thanks to the “Ambient Mode” of Google’s Chromecast as well as the screensaver feature of AppleTV. In my mother’s last four months of life, as she faced terminal brain cancer, she also was…

  • iPad Screen Recording for Narrated Sketchnotes

    I love creating both sketchnotes and narrated sketchnotes, and helping students learn to create sketchnotes! I’m now teaching media literacy and robotics at Providence Day School in Charlotte, North Carolina, and our secondary students have iPads to use as their personal digital learning devices. For our sketchnoting unit, we’re pairing communication skill development with sketchnoting…

  • Podcast480: Pedagogy Matters with Shelly Fryer

    Welcome to the first of a new podcast interview series I’m titling, “Pedagogy Matters.” This episode, recorded on May 30, 2022, features the pedagogy of my wife, Shelly Fryer, which I would summarize as “A Pedagogy of Computational Thinking: Constructionism, Coding, Robotics, Play, and Student Choice.” Shelly started her journey as a classroom teacher in…

  • 15 Things I Love About My Classroom (and teaching situation!)

    I’ve been teaching and working in education since 1995. The past 3 years, as I’ve served as a media literacy teacher, instructional coach for our teachers, and (last year) an introductory Spanish teacher have been some of my best ever. Yesterday afternoon and evening, I recorded and edited a 17 minute video I titled, “15…

  • Conspiracy Theories, Apollo Moon Landings and SIFT 

    The last 3 days, Shelly and I have WONDERFUL learning and networking experiences attending the NASA 2022 Space Exploration Educators Conference (#SEEC2022) at Space Center Houston (@SpaceCenterHou). For the past two years, I’ve taught a media literacy unit to my 6th graders called, “Froot Loop Conspiracy Theories,” focusing on the Apollo Moon landings, YouTubers who…

  • Lesson Cast: Sharing a Class Recording with Minimal Steps

    This past summer as we prepared for the challenges and uncertainies of the COVID-19 dominated 2020-21 academic school year, our head of school asked me to work on an educational technology challenge. How could our teachers best share face-to-face / in-person lesson recordings with students who either chose or were required to learn at home…

  • Recording and Sharing Your iPad with In-Person and Remote Learning Students

    Update 8/24/2020: I’ve created a step-by-step tutorial for these steps, using either Google Meet or Zoom. This is linked from our “Lesson Cast” support page on our school instructional support website. Today is our 3rd day back with students for the 2020-21 academic year, and it’s both good and challenging. Most of our students have…