Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Category: apple

  • Priceless Media Hostages

    Priceless Media Hostages

    This evening I looked through an old box of media tapes and CDs which managed to survive our 1000+ mile move from Oklahoma to North Carolina two years ago. There are some priceless artifacts here. Basically all the Digital 8 and MiniDV video tapes which I recorded of our kids and family growing up are…

  • Remembering TxTIP in Floydada and Post, Texas (2004-05)

    Remembering TxTIP in Floydada and Post, Texas (2004-05)

    Once upon a time in the late 1990s, there was a teacher in Lubbock, Texas, who had a dream. He dreamed that all the students in our schools could have their own personal computers to access information, communicate with others, and complete both assignments and projects required for classes at school. That teacher left the…

  • 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…