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USAFA 2025 Grad Parade
Today I had the opportunity to attend the graduation parade at the United States Air Force Academy for the Class of 2025. This is an all-wing parade, and features a special “wedge formation” by the firstees or seniors, who wear gold sashes around their waist. When Academy cadets join the wing after basic cadet training…
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Ep 483: Creativity, Code, and Compassion: AI Lessons from Middle School and Beyond
In this special 20th-anniversary episode of Moving at the Speed of Creativity, Wes Fryer reflects on a dynamic year of teaching and explores how artificial intelligence—especially through the Flint AI platform—has reshaped his middle and high school classrooms. From supporting refugee advocacy with student-created “InfoPics,” to guiding AP Computer Science students through AI-assisted writing practice,…
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Preserving the Past Through Technology
At the March 2025 NCMLE Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, the American Book Company‘s podcasting team interviewed me and published an 8 minute audio recording of our conversation. Check it out! “Preserving the Past Through Technology” My middle school family oral history unit is available on my curriculum sharing website. Learn more about Bob Sprankle…
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Better Video Audio with Auphonic
This afternoon and evening I created a new 12 minute video for my “Cook with Wes” video series on YouTube, “Spring Cleaning My RecTeq RT-700 Bull Smoker: Tips & Tricks!” I recorded the audio on my iPhone 13 using a cheap tripod from Amazon and iPhone tripod mount. I edited the video clips together using…
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Martian Perchlorates in Minecraft Education
My middle school computer science students are wrapping up the last project in our “Minecraft Mars” or Coding Mars” unit this month. (In April 2025) In this unit, my 6th, 7th and 8th graders use Microsoft MakeCode for Minecraft to make a “robot” (their “agent”) autonomously farm different kinds of plants, build protective glass domes…
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Our Family: Ghibli Style
Wow, the Substack article, “The Colors Of Her Coat” by Scott Alexander taught me several new things: For deeper reading see “Welcome to the semantic apocalypse: Studio Ghibli style and the draining of meaning” by Erik Hoel. Via Ethan Mollick’s March 30th Substack article, “No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation – When Language Models Learn…
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Media Kit Lesson
Today in my middle school web design class, we wrapped up a multi-week unit and project I call our “Image and Video Media Kit.” In this post I’ll summarize the unit and share the techniques I used for student presentations this semester, which went smoothly. You can access this full lesson (including sample media kits…
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Coding Mars
This is an audio recording and the presentation slides from “Coding Mars with Minecraft Makecode and Scratch,” my presentation on March 25, 2025 at the NCMLE ‘Middle School Matters’ Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. The session description was: Build a Mars Colony In Minecraft with Robots and Code? YES! In our middle school computer programming class,…
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Microaggressions in Middle School
These are my notes from Dr. Laurie A Ramirez’ presentation, “Microaggressions at the Middle – What are they and what do we do about them?“ at the March 25, 2025 NCMLE ‘Middle School Matters’ Conference MY THOUGHT AND REFLECTIONS ARE IN ALL CAPS. Presentation slides MICROAGGRESSIONS in Middle Level Education NCMLE – March 2025 by…
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Wisdom from Heather Smith
Heather Smith is the 2024 North Carolina Teacher of the Year! She teaches 8th grade math teacher at Waynesville Middle School in Haywood County Schools. These are my notes from her presentation, “Teachers: The Ultimate Influencers“ at the March 24, 2025 NCMLE ‘Middle School Matters’ Conference MY THOUGHT AND REFLECTIONS ARE IN ALL CAPS. In this…
