ISTE Teacher Education Network Book Study - Edumagic

Today is the first day of the ISTE Teacher Education Network Book Study that I am participating in.

Resources:

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Edumagic: A Guide for Preservice Teachers 
by Samantha Fecich

"This book challenges the thought that “teaching” begins only after certification and college graduation. Instead, it describes how students in teacher preparation programs have value to offer their future colleagues, even as they are learning to be teachers! This book provides positive examples, helpful tools, and plenty of encouragement for preservice teachers to learn, to dream, and to do." ~ EduMatch

I'm looking forward to reading this book and expanding my professional learning network with other educators. Knowing what kind of edtech training preservice teachers have in their university courses helps me to support them better while they are doing their student teaching at schools in my school district.

Join the book study on Twitter under the hashtags #ISTETEN and #Edumagic.

Schoology Blended Learning Leader Program: Day 1

Today was the first day of the Schoology Blended Learning Leader Program cohort in my school district!

Resources:
Blended Learning in Grades 4-12: Leveraging The Power of Technology to Create Student-Centered Classrooms by Catlin Tucker

I'm looking forward to reading this book and learning more about best practices in blended learning and about different models for implementing blended learning in the classroom, and of course, learning more power tips and tricks to designing effective courses in Schoology.

Today we focused on:

• The benefits of blended learning
• Blended learning models
• The ISTE Educator Standards
• Course design in Schoology
• Pages and media albums
• Digital portfolios as a way to reflect and track self-assessment documents
• Digital portfolios as a way to share out resources with others

TED Masterclass

I received notification today that my TED Masterclass will be starting soon.

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I'm really looking forward to this opportunity and will share more details later! I remember what a great opportunity it was to speak at TEDx Burnsville and how the process of preparing improved my speaking skills.

Book Study - Coding as a Playground

#WhatWereReading - I started reading Coding as a Playground for the CIRCL Educators Book Study that I am participating in.

Resources:

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Coding as a Playground: Programming and Computational Thinking in the Early Childhood Classroom
by Marina Umaschi Bers

"Coding as a Playground is the first book to focus on how young children (ages 7 and under) can engage in computational thinking and be taught to become computer programmers, a process that can increase both their cognitive and social-emotional skills. Readers will learn how coding can engage children as producers―and not merely consumers―of technology in a playful way." ~ Routledge - An Eye On Education Book

I'm looking forward to reading this book and learning more about coding and how it fits in the early childhood classroom.

Creating #BookSnaps With Markup On The iPad

Recently I had the opportunity to share the idea of using BookSnaps as an alternative to traditional reading logs for independent reading books.

*Image from Mosquitoland

BookSnaps allow students to quickly create shareable visual artifacts of applying close reading strategies while reading their independent reading books, make connections to the text, and share text snippets with classmates like a mini book talk by digitally annotating the text and saving the result as an image.

Resources:

The steps for creating BookSnaps with the Markup extension in the Photos app on the iPad are listed below. You can also grab a PDF of these steps here.

I'm always looking for more great examples of student-created BookSnaps. If you would like to share some great examples of your students' work, please send them my way.

*Mosquitoland by David Arnold