One of the best metaphors I have heard when it comes to talking about identifying those barriers that are created around student learning in our instructional design has to do with fish and the water they swim in. A fish may not be fully aware of the water they are swimming in as it is…
Today I had the pleasure of taking our Overwatch 2 team to the state tournament as part of the Iowa High School Esports Association (https://www.iahsea.org/). We finished the regular season 6-1 and entered the tournament as the #3 seed. We won the first round against Williamsburg HS but would lose the next round to Linn-Mar,…
Google seems to be constantly updating Sheets to make it easier to not analyze and use data but also easier to enter data. One of main features I have always used is the ability to have a dropdown in a cell. This dropdown makes it easier to either enter the same information time and time…
Esports in K12 schools has exploded over the last few years with schools creating clubs and competing in either state leagues or in some of the paid leagues (my preference is always for the state leagues). I first really thought about Esports at our schools when at FETC in January of 2020. While being someone…
Although ISTE 2017 was almost 2 1/2 months ago, I am still thinking about all of the great conversations I had with other educators after my Ingnite presentation. I was ecstatic to be able to share how my learning as a kid was affected by a piece of technology. Without that piece of technology, a…
For the better part of the last two decades, we have been trying to find ways to incorporate the 4C’s of 21st-century learning into classrooms. Collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity are all skills that we need to ensure that our students possess before they leave our buildings and go into their post-K12 lives. One…
This spring I am getting the chance to teach a college course again for future teachers, this time all around educational technology for secondary education. While working over lessons and figuring out the main ideas I wanted to make sure were highlighted, there is one that I have always stated any time someone has asked…
In the last couple of years, Google has added a lot of functionality to Google Docs by incorporating tools that can be used in highly effective ways. One tool that I think many people are not fully aware of are the Smart chips. Smart chips are ways to better insert information like dates, people, places,…
As we are nearing the end of the semester for many schools, many students can get tripped up as they are experiencing a lot of tasks all due at the same time. Making sure that students have easy and quick access to a list of tasks they are supposed to be completing should be key…
As an Esports coach at our school, I like to keep track of all of our stats and scores, so of course I use a Google Sheet to do that. Now I could simply use a basic sheet but that is no fun. Instead I have a sheet that uses a combination of equations (Sum,…
I have very high hopes for how well AI can make teaching and learning more effective in the next few years but there are ways that we can start using these new tools now to make learning better. Using an AI chat tool like ChatGPT or Bard, we can start to look at ways to…
I have a series of videos that goes over the top equations that I use with Google Sheets but there are many ways you can combine those equations to do even more fun things with data. Included in those videos was one about the Filter equation which allows you to easily filter out the rows…
With the loss of Jamboard, there comes the loss of some simple ways that it was used in the classroom and now teachers have to find a new way to do what they did before. (This is also why I say to never marry technology, but to date it, it is always a shorter term…
One really nice feature in Figjam is the ability to hide sections or items so their contents are not visible until you unhide them. This helps to direct the focus on the sections you need to be focusing on and can help remove any distraction or help to just control the flow of the work.…
One of the biggest features I was waiting for as I make the full transition away from using Jamboards to Figjam, is the ability to easily convert a Jamboard file to a Figjam file. They have just recently released this feature and it is as easy as you would want. All you have to do…
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