Category: design
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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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Dynamic Audio Waveform Videos
Have you seen audio podcast “highlight videos” as reels on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or other social media websites which include an audio waveform animation that is synchronized to the podcast? Today I explored a few tools, with help from ChatGPT recommendations, to create my own “dynamic audio waveform video.” Here is the 12 minute video…
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Packet Defender 1.0
Today was the first day of our spring semester, and I’m teaching middle school web design again. As part of our introductory class, we watched the video, “The Internet: IP Addresses & DNS” from Code.org and then played a Kahoot I made with AI about it, using the video transcript. As we learn to create…
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ALT Text for Web Accessibility
In the semester web design course I teach for middle school students, I share a series of videos and activities in a lesson series on web accessibility. I first became aware of the importance of web accessibility when I served as the first “Director of Distance Learning” for the College of Education at Texas Tech…
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Remove Background in Adobe Express
I LOVE creating and sharing InfoPics. My favorite iOS app for creating InfoPIcs has (for years now) been Adobe Express for iOS. The app has updated in many ways, but it still retains its core features and UI for quickly adding readable, contrasting text to an image. This morning as I created a “Bible Verse…
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Scratch Coding Resources
I received an email earlier this year from a teacher in South Africa who is interested in starting a school and including coding in the curriculum. I finally responded to that message (yikes!) asking for links to CODING RESOURCES I use and have shared, including resources for using Scratch coding from MIT. These are the…
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Visualizing Off-Planet Habitats
My middle school computer programming students are continuing to work on our “Coding Mars” unit, in which they are using Minecraft MakeCode to simulate the 3D printing of structures and habitats which Icon of Austin, Texas, is under contract with NASA to do first on the moon / the lunar surface and (ultimately) on Mars.…
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Reflections on PD Hackathon 2023
Today I’ve had an opportunity to participate, facilitate, and volunteer as a judge in our fall 2023 Hackathon at our school, Providence Day School of Charlotte, North Carolina. This is the second time I’ve been able to be part of the Hackathon, and in this post I’d like to reflect a little about some of…