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Showing posts from January, 2017

Tech Educator Programs

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Certifications can show that you are willing to go further to learn and develop as a teacher. Certifications for a type of technology can show that you are proficient or at least a working knowledge of the software. Here are three certifications you might want to try. Apple Distinguished Educator This was one of the first certification programs and is one of the most difficult to achieve. To become an ADE, you need to demonstrate you integrate Apple products in innovative ways through a 2-minute video. They give some advice for how to do this, but planning early is important. Apple Teacher Apple Teacher is the ADE's little brother. There are two types of certification - Mac and iPad. Each has a total of nine (could be 10 as they are adding more) and each program has five questions that require you to read a scenario about a project using and determine how to solve it by dragging in answers or selecting from a few choices. The tests are free, so there is no reason...

Using Trello in MYP Design

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I started using Google Classroom for the first time this year. Foolishly, I thought students knew how to use it, and assignments started coming in that were in the wrong format or getting "lost". I was doing some resource gathering for collaboration tools and found that Trello has and  education page  that gives some examples of how it is used in classrooms to facilitate collaboration, but when I saw the example of the writing process, I thought I need to try this in Design. The MYP Design Cycle is less of a cycle, and more of a linear process. Yes, students should be able to jump back and forth, but in reality, they go step by step. (I do realize the way I am teaching plays a huge role in this. And that gives me an idea to let students go through the cycle as they please as long as they, in a way of their choice, "hit" the criterion.) A photo posted by Thomas Hammerlund (@thomashammerlund) on Nov 22, 2016 at 9:05pm PST Each student is assig...

Teach Curation

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Something hit me as I was bookmarking websites today, "I have a lot of tags that are not useful so I should go through sometime and fix them." Finding information and referring to it is something I use all the time. Looking at some of the tags I have used, I find many that are not so descriptive. Then, for some reason, I wondered what students today do. I don't know why I went in that direction, but I realized (remembered?) that curation is a skill I should teach more. Automotive Social   Content by  Mr Rohit Bhargava Image by  Welenia Studios   via Flickr Come to think of it, teaching how to organize a hard drive or Google Drive is another skill they should learn -- or at least learn different ways of organizing.