Arts Education

This week you can't swing a dead cat without hitting 5 or 10 tweets about ISTE17 . I've never been, and I'm sure it's awesome ( or is it? ), but I have participated a couple of times in the #NOTATISTE Community on Google Plus. T he community was started in 2013 by Dennis Grice, but this year is hosted by Peggy George , Vicky Sedgwick , and Jennifer Wagner . In the #NOTATISTE Community , there are resources to make your own badge, connect with others, attack daily challenges, and win door prizes. In short, lots of great sharing like there is at ISTE without delayed flights and overpriced hotel rooms. Today's daily challenge was to post about someone you follow (Here's looking at you, Eric Curts !). The community of G+ has almost 2000 members (wow!) and you can meet some of them here . I like the atmosphere and the sharing on Google Plus, but I really like the communities. Anyone can start a community about any topic. I belong to a bunch of them (Google, iPads, A...

In one of my most popular posts, I compared some key features of Recap and Flipgrid , two great tools that use video to capture student thinking. Last week I had the great fortune to talk a bit with Brian Lamb, co-founder of Recap, about some of the innovative things happening at Recap. The one that I was most excited to learn about are Recap Journeys. The foundation of Recap Journeys is student curiosity. Pose a problem. Show a scenario. Do a demo. What do students notice? What do students wonder? Use the questions of the students to drive the learning of the lesson. The Recap Journey begins with a 60-second video that quickly introduces a topic. Students can use Recap to share their noticing and wondering, their predictions and estimations, their ideas and hypotheses.  When building a Journey, teachers can curate a small set of resources that students can use to explore the topic.  The student ideas can then become the focus of the lesson. As a long time lover of scientific...

Last week I posted to my blog that I achieved the Apple Teacher designation and that I picked up a number of handy tips during the process even though I had been using iPads in my classroom for over five years. Here I share my favorite things I learned: 1. Slide Over OK, in fairness, this one was not really new to me. I learned about Slide Over, the ability to slide over a multi-tasking work panel while in an app (two apps open at once), last year. I admit, though, that I haven't used it much at all. During the Apple Teacher work, I often worked in one app and used the slide over panel to read directions for the projects. Now that I have done that so much, it's becoming part of my work process. I can be browsing with Safari and adding things to my calendar or responding to text messages without closing an app. It feels more productive! 2. Markup Photos I can't believe that I didn't know that there were markup tools native to the Photos app. Click the Edit icon and th...

Last September I signed up for Apple Teacher . Apple Teacher is a free professional development program that offers educators an opportunity for self-paced PD and recognition for what they know and are able to do on an iPad or a Mac.  It was my goal to earn this distinction by the end of the school year, but I didn't quite make it (until this past week!). One of the reasons that I kept back-burnering this was that I didn't know exactly what to expect. In case, you're in that same boat, let me give you some details. By earning eight badges, a teacher earns the distinction of Apple Teacher . There are three tracks: iPad, Mac and Swift Playgrounds. The badges are iPad:   iPad, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Garage Band, iMovie, Productivity, & Creativity Mac:    Mac, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Garage Band, iMovie, Productivity, & Creativity Swift: Swift Playground App, Coding Concepts, Swift Code, Coding in the Classroom Once a teacher is signed up, she gains access to ...