Mr Hammerlund

This year I have tried to keep up with all the great learning that is happening in the building, but it has been hard. I have an idea for next year where other teachers would write their own posts describing the great things they are doing in their classrooms. I fear the additional burden the would place on teachers and I wonder if teachers would even be interested in this. The most precious of resources we have is time. And there is never enough of it. Today I listened to the Every Classroom Matters podcast. The topic was reflection with George Couros . He quoted John Dewey: “We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience. When I brought this idea up to Victor, he suggested even devoting workshop time to use for teachers to reflect on their blogs. How great would it be to have a period of 30 minutes to: put thoughts down in writing?  consider alternate ways of improving a lesson? write a blog post for parents to read about what's go...

One of my favorite tools within Google Docs/Slides is the ability to search for content and images. What a time save that can be! However, you have to be careful and pay attention to the licenses. I was watching a YouTube video where a professional designer was making a flyer for a school. He started off by using the image search feature within Google Slides to find an image. In the video, he points out that using Google Image search within Google Docs only gives you images that are safe to reuse. Well, yes and no. Even when Google has indexed an image as Fair Use, the license can change. And often the CC license requires an attribution. (And really, you are using someone else's work, so you should attribute anyway, right?) The video below shows one example. It is always a good idea to check the license terms yourself when using images you find.