Mr Hammerlund

I just revisited this video from Simon Sinek where he talks about a leader's job which is to make people feel safe.  When people feel safe, they are more willing to try new things. For someone trying to encourage people to be more innovative, this is an important question. If people feel safe - why do they? If they don't - why don't they? How can I gauge this among the staff? I suppose I could send a survey. I could look for innovation (or look for those who are resistant).

These are three books I recommend reading about digital life. The Internet of Garbage Web Literacy for the Student Fact Checker It's complicated : the social lives of networked teens / danah boyd  

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This year I have set up a Slack Channel where I can share out different tech ideas for teachers at my school.  When we came back I was asked to do a presenation about "tech". When I asked what I should talk about I was just told that the ideas I have been sharing out have been great. Here is what I came up with. I wanted to demonstrate a few tools (Answer Garden, Yellkey, Bit.ly, and Jamboard for icebreakers.) Teachers were mostly interested in Baamboozle, Google Earth, Screencastify, and Google Arts and Culture. Some of the links might work but some will not work. Yellkeys will definitely not work because they were set to 24 hours. (yellkey.com)

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash Last night I led a parent information session about technology at our school and how to keep kids safe online. It was good to use Zoom again after being away from it for so long. I recently upgraded my computer to Big Sur and had to wipe most of the data on my HD, so I needed to reinstall Zoom. The problem on my end was that I did not remember some of the functions, so as I was presenting I was blind to much of what was happening. Fortunately, there was a good team of people around me to field questions and monitor the chat. One question that came up multiple times was about screen time and parents being concerned that their kids are getting too much screen time.  Screen time - bad And yes, on the surface it might look like that. Our grades 5 & 6 are 1:1 and the younger grades do digital activities during the day. We also assign short amounts of skill-building activities through websites such as IXL or Raz Kids as homework. Not only do these ...