All Teachers Are Literacy Teachers

The more I research, the more I am convinced that helping our students become more literate is the key to unlocking their future success.  Below are a few articles that illustrate how important it is for all teachers, regardless of grade level and content area, to teach our students how to read increasingly more complex text as they progress through school.
In this high school, reading and writing happens in every class, even math and chemistry
Nonfiction Reading Improved but Still Short of College Readiness Levels

OETC 2016 Here We Come!

Ohio's largest edtech conference of the year, the OETC, is right around the corner and I am super-pumped to be a presenter on Thursday, February 11th.  My session is entitled "Must Have Google Add-on Apps for Speedy Grading".  As a district, we have decided to send four people from each building.  Educators who are part of the Blended Learning Crew, or BLC, have first dibs, but please contact me for more info if you are interested in attending!

Say "Hello" to the Blended Learning Crew

The Blended Learning Crew, or BLC.  Alas, another committee denoted with an acronym involving a whole other series of meetings.  Yes, I know what you're thinking.  However, this one, first formed last year and being comprised of educators from each building, has made tremendous strides in providing direction for teachers in our endeavor to use technology to promote personalized learning. Here is our recently adopted mission statement:  

The Blended Learning Crew provides support for teachers to embrace technology for maximized personalized learning with the realization that students will need to be fluent in its processes and applications for career and college readiness.

Thus far, the BLC has completely revamped the district's Blended Learning Policy to make it a usable document for teachers, outlining technology-integrating procedures and evaluation tools for digital resources.  It is now posted on our district staff page.  Of course, the ongoing challenge then is how can we efficiently communicate all that we are doing and are working towards to each other?  Still working on that one, but this is a first attempt.

Kicking Off Computer Science Week with an Hour of Code

Happy Computer Science Education Week!

Q:  Why celebrate computer science education week with our students?

A:  By 2020, an estimated one million computer programming jobs in the U.S. will go unfilled,  according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Today Exploring Computer Science student, Aaron Gross, helped Mrs. Molenaar's 7th grade math students celebrate the opening of Computer Science Education Week.  Aaron led and assisted the students in an Hour of Code through code.org.  Students solved a minimum of 15 puzzles using commands common to computer programming in a gaming-like platform with characters from Minecraft, Star Wars, and Frozen.  For more information and resources to expose your K-12 students to an Hour of Code,  check out the following sites (arranged in order of youngest students to oldest ones).

Kodable https://www.kodable.com/hour-of-code

Tynker https://www.tynker.com/hour-of-code/

Code.org https://code.org/

Khan Academy https://www.khanacademy.org/hourofcode

Codecademy https://www.codecademy.com/hour-of-code

Do things that scare you to grow

I just finished my first webinar via Hangouts on Air today and was just a tad bit nervous knowing that educators from all over Ohio and who knows elsewhere may have been viewing my presentation live. Even  technology coaches are not immune to the anxiety of exploring new technological territories, and unlike the many screencasts I've taken (over and over again), there were no re-dos for this one. The good news is . . . . I survived.  I posted it below - it's all about accessibility tools, most of them Chrome extensions.  Special thanks to Eric Curts of SPARCC who arranged the Hangout on Air (HOA) and Carrie Rathsack, moderator of this webinar and the leader of TILO (Technology Integration Leaders of Ohio).