The best teachers on film...

I've been thinking about this for a long time. There are lots of movies about teachers, teaching, working with students... and as we all know a lot of them are, respectfully, garbage (The Substitute, I'm looking at you).

And yes, there are the "inspired by true events" films like Freedom Writers, but even those, I feel, take far to many liberties with reality and are more nuanced marketing machines than actual depictions of the majority of teaching. Don't get me wrong, Freedom Writers is a great story, and I have no doubt Erin Gruwell made a lasting impact on her students, but she only taught for 4 years and then moved on. Yes, she is helping educate future teachers and working on her foundation, but lets be honest, how many of us teach for 4 years and then continue a career as a "teacher"? Not many. For many of us 4 years is just the beginning.

So, here is my list of the movies and teachers I feel are the most true to the profession. These are the roles I feel get at the core of what we do, most often through nuanced subtly most audiences probably don't even notice...

So many passwords, so little time....

Takeaway: There are lots of platforms that will require a password, figure out a system for yourself to keep them all straight, and use single-sign in options when possible...

Facebook, Twitter, personal email, work email, online banking.... The amount of digital accounts we seem to have these days is at times overwhelming. How do we keep track of all the accounts and passwords and stay safe and secure?

Here are a few things I do, and often recommend to colleagues...

Going Google - An Overview of Google's iOS Apps

Just because Google & Apple are public competitors doesn't mean their platforms & services don't play nicely on your devices...

Google and Apple have a very contentious public relationship. Apple even went as far as to announce Bing as the search engine for the iOS 7 version of Siri at the World Wide Developer Conference back in June (for those who know Apple's history with Microsoft, a switch to Bing, owned by Microsoft, is a big deal - Google is still Safari's default search engine, so Apple is hedging a bit...).

All this public contention doesn't mean Apple's iOS devices aren't great platforms for accessing & running Google's app offering. I work in a Google Apps for Education school and every teacher has an iPad. We mix & match Google & the iPad on a daily basis to get the most out of each.

The best part of the Google iOS app suite is they are all free!

Here is a quick primer on a few of the Google apps I use the most on my iPad...

School Technology Summit 2013 Presentations - #NYCSTS13

Welcome to my portion of the School Technology Summit 2013, presented by the Division of Instructional & Information Technology of the New York City Department of Education!

In this post you will find links & embeds of my three session slide decks. The day looks to be an amazing day of learning with a lot of great session opportunities. I am putting all my presentation resources here, in this one post, to make it easy for everyone to have access to my content, even if you are unable to attend in person.

I hope you find my material & presentation valuable.
Enjoy the conference!

My students do my tweeting...

Recently, I decided to create a Twitter account for my classroom (the computer lab @PS10Tech).

I was inspired to do this by Ms. Glembocki, a 2nd grade teacher here at PS 10. Ms. Glembocki tweets fairly regularly, sharing news and information about her class with her followers, many of whom are parents. Recently, Ms. Glembocki decided to assign a student tweeter for every day. It's a new classroom role for the students. One student a day is in charge of her twitter account, and the student uses an iPad designed specifically for classroom use to tweet the happenings of the day. Students introduce themselves and sign each tweet. In addition, she uses the hashtag #2310st to designate the tweet is coming from a "student tweeter of class 2-310." Her 2nd graders "live blog" the day. It's a fantastic idea and I wanted to do it for my lab...

Twitter @PS10Brooklyn - Our Hashtags!

This is cross-posted from http://ps10tech.blogspot.com/

In the previous post, Twitter @10, I wrote about Twitter as a platform and offered a solution for following Twitter users without actually have a Twitter account, or even a smartphone.

The previous post also listed all the teachers with Twitter accounts at PS 10.

This post is more geared toward people with a Twitter account looking to get a more streamlined PS 10 experience out of the Twitter platform...

Old dog, same trick, new name...

This morning I handed a teacher her re-imaged & updated MacBook. She was running an old OS and having problems. I upgraded her, installed all her Smartboard software, Dropbox, etc, etc, etc...

When I gave it to her we had this exchange:

Teacher: "so all my old documents are erased, right?"
Me:  "no, they were in Dropbox, weren't they?."
Teacher: "No, I know you told me to do that but I didn't."
Me: "Why not?"
Teacher: "Because you can't teach an old dog new tricks and I only know how to use my Documents folder."

That exchange synthesized the core stumbling block most teachers encounter when it comes to technology and technology integration. They assume it's difficult and confusing, and they can't learn it, just because it is something new or different. Most often, new technology is exactly what they've always done, just called something different, or looked at from a different angle.

When we logged in to Dropbox and set up her folder I showed her how easy it was to navigate & save to it. She looked at me and said "so, it's just a folder that's everywhere?"

Yup.

"And I should install it at home too, so I have everything I need?"

Yup.

"Oh, that's easy"

What I left her with was the idea of "don't over think technology." She was wary of Dropbox because she didn't know what it was. She assumed it was a complex technological thing thrust upon her just to drive her batty. She realized all she needed to know was it was a folder. A folder like any other, but by a different name. A folder that now existed wherever she wanted it to be.

Dropbox, as with most new technology, isn't dramatically changing the way things are done, it just calling it something new and giving you greater access. If you can save to a Documents folder you can save to a Dropbox folder.

What was once just your computer became portable with your floppy disc. What was once your floppy disc became greater with your thumb/flash drive. What was once your thumb drive has now become your ubiquitous "cloud" storage...

Saving is saving is saving...

...Old dog, same tricks, new name...

Twitter @PS10Brooklyn

This is cross posted from http://ps10tech.blogspot.com/

Twitter is a great resource. It is no longer just Ashton Kutcher talking about what he ate for breakfast (although, I'm sure there is probably still a lot of that going on).

These days teachers are using Twitter as another method of communicating with parents. There is a PS 10 Twitter account that posts school announcements, shares classroom work, and in general acts as another way to connect the school with the community. A lot of parents have signed up for Twitter (its free) just to follow their child's classroom feed or the PS 10 feed. There are many teachers who speak highly of the home-school connecting Twitter fosters and the instructional engagement it supports.

iPad vs iPad mini (vs the MacBookAir, sort of...)

Takeaway: in a mobile world, is it a fair fight between the iPad/iPad mini & the MacBook...? The iPad stands tall, the beloved Air stays home...

I just spent three days at the annual ACSD conference, this year held in Chicago. As I was packing, I was staring at my devices, trying to decide which to pack. Do I take the MacBookAir, the iPad, the iPad mini...? In the end, I couldn't decide, so I took all three. Here's how that shook out...

Tech Reflections from ASCD 2013

I just finished my first trip to the yearly ASCD conference. It was a lot of fun experiencing a conference of that size from an attendee perspective (in a former life I worked tech conferences such as COMDEX and PC Expo for eWeek). More importantly, it was great to get out of the bubble, so to speak, and see and hear what others are doing...