Category: design

  • Lesson Ideas and Tips for Language Teachers using Scratch, Minecraft and more!

    A few weeks ago, I had a wonderful opportunity to share a Saturday morning Zoom webinar (for me in Oklahoma) with language teachers in the United Kingdom, as part of a webinar series hosted by the Association for Language Learning’s All London Branch. The title of my webinar presentation was, “Lesson Ideas and Tips for…

  • Podcast475: Lessons Learned Teaching During the Pandemic

    Welcome to the first episode of Moving at the Speed of Creativity for 2021, now starting its 16th year as an educational podcast! This podcast episode features a conversation with Shelly and Wesley Fryer on January 3, 2021, reflecting on some of their lessons learned teaching elementary and middle school students during 2020, the first…

  • The Story of our Family Recipe Sharing WordPress Website

    Family recipes are important. Being able to cook a much-loved family recipe can bring back a flood of good memories, but is also practically important for those of us who do the grocery shopping and cooking for our families or just for ourselves! In this post, I’ll share the backstory of a new website, “Fryer…

  • Designing And Narrating a Dream House Tour in Spanish

    This semester, for a variety of reasons, I’m having the opportunity to teach two classes of introductory 5th grade Spanish in addition to our 5th and 6th grade Media Literacy classes. 5th graders at our school take a semester of Spanish and a semester of French, and based on those experiences decide which language to…

  • How I Use Noun Project Icons in my Class Lesson Slideshows

    This past school year I have absolutely loved the opportunity to return to the classroom teaching fifth and sixth grade digital literacy and media literacy at Casady school, and also teaching an adult Sunday school class at our church (First Presbyterian of Edmond) titled, “Curiosity and Questions: Jesus and Science.” In both cases, I use…

  • Virtual Minecraft Camps for Elementary and Middle School Students: June 2020

    Update June 2, 2020: mdtech.casady.org/minecraft has updated information about both these upcoming virtual Minecraft camps for students. Five years ago, our youngest daughter (then age 11) participated in a virtual, summer Minecraft camp through “Connected Camps,” an outstanding organization based in California. She had a great experience, and we recorded a 20 minute podcast reflection…

  • Learn From Mike Wesch How to Create Better Videos for Students

    The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed school leaders, teachers, students and parents in the United States to respond in different ways to “shelter in place / shelter at home” mandates. It has pushed many K-12 teachers into the role of “emergency remote learning” instructors, even if the courses they teach were never intended to be “online”…

  • Tips and Strategies for Remote Learning (March 2020)

    For the past four weeks, starting two weeks before our Spring Break last week, teachers, administrators and staff at our school have been preparing for “remote school” for students as a result of the coronavirus / COVID-19 crisis. On March 19, 2020, our Head of School sent out a letter to our parents including information…

  • Deep Work and the Race to Minecraft

    Last Thursday was the last day of our second trimester at school, and therefore the end of my second opportunity in 2019-20 to teach Digital and Media Literacy to 5th and 6th Graders. As classroom teachers, one of the things we quickly learn is how different the dynamics of separate classes can be based on…

  • Your Seminary Needs Digital and Media Literacy Instruction

    I am enjoying the opportunity to teach adult Sunday School (again) at our church this year, and utilize Francis Collins‘ (@NIHDirector) book, “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief” as our initial course text for our class titled, “Curiosity and Questions: Jesus and Science.” This week in preparing for our lesson and…