Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Category: literacy

  • Schools Blocking YouTube and Digital Citizenship

    Content filtering in schools has always been contentious since students and teachers first gained access to the World Wide Web and the Internet in the 1990s. Today in 2019, however, many people might be surprised that “draconian content filtering policies” (at least in the opinion of this author) are still in place in some schools.…

  • Adult Identity and the “I Can’t Use Technology Well” Introduction

    Last Friday evening before turning in for the night, I shared a six part, threaded series of thoughts on Twitter based on frequent conversations I have with technology-fearful adults. Before reflecting a bit more on these ideas, as well as sharing some of the responses these tweets invited from others, I’ll share this series of…

  • Seesaw Skills, Assessment and Parent Feedback

    Last week I had an opportunity to attend the LLI Southwest Conference at The Oakridge School in Arlington, Texas, and present with two of our second grade teachers about our “Seesaw Skills iPad Pilot Project,” which I’m leading this year with teachers in our Lower Division at Casady School in Oklahoma City. In this post,…

  • Lessons Learned as a School Director of Technology

    This is my fourth year to serve as the Director of Technology at The Casady School in Oklahoma City, and I’ve been reflecting lately on the multitude of skills I’ve developed as well as “lessons learned” during my time of service in this administrative and leadership role. In this post, I’ll attempt to summarize (but…

  • Tips for Self-Publishing Your Book (February 2019)

    Today I had an opportunity to share a 41 minute presentation with Mrs. Finley’s 12th grade Creative Writing class at our school, which I called, “Book Publishing 101.” Her students have spent the past several weeks writing and creating original children’s picture books, and publishing them as eBooks as well as printed books using Book…

  • Guidelines for Digital Sharing

    The predominant technologies of a culture change literacy. When our society was primarily a print reading culture, reading and writing texts were appropriately the main activities of students in schools working on developing literacy skills. As our society has become increasingly dominated by multimedia, the imperative grows stronger to formally change the predominant literacy development…

  • Security, Privacy, and Digital Citizenship (February 2017)

    Today in Columbus, Ohio, I shared a breakout session at the Ohio Educational Technology Conference (OETC) titled, “Security, Privacy, and Digital Citizenship.” The description was: As video surveillance, social media sharing of personal information, identity theft and publicized hacks of businesses have become daily norms, how can we best protect ourselves, our families and our…

  • Inspired by Ohio Student Interactive Scratch Games

    I’m presenting and attending at the 2018 Ohio Educational Technology Conference in Columbus today and tomorrow, and this afternoon I stopped by the poster sessions outside the vendor hall. I met several different Ohio high school students who have been learning to create interactive games using the free Scratch programming language and MakeyMakey controllers. This is…

  • Developing Computational Thinking with Scratch Coding (webinar video)

    Last night I had an opportunity to present a free, evening webinar for the Oklahoma State Department of Education’s Educational Technology Division, as part of a series they hosted to prepare teachers for Computer Science Education Week. The title of my presentation was, “Developing Computational Thinking with Scratch Coding.” The webinar recording is 1 hour and 11…

  • You Need to Be Talking about Phishing and Ransomware

    Digital Citizenship involves both rights and responsibilities. One of the responsibilities we have as digital citizens is to help educate others about safe and appropriate online behavior. As the number of phishing and ransomware security events in schools and elsewhere around the world continues to increase, we each have important responsibilities to talk to the…