There are many engaging assessment tools that teachers can use for face-to-face instruction, remote synchronous instruction, and asynchronous instruction. Many of these tools go beyond multiple choice and short answer question to offer engaging assessment options including video discussions, image annotation, and collaborative boards. These tools offer a variety of features for both formative and summative assessments that provide data to help inform classroom instruction.

I’ve discussed several situations where teachers may be breaking copyright law in their classroom. Whether that is making copies of handouts that are copyrighted to or using Netflix in your classroom, teachers need to be careful to ensure they are not violating copyright law. Recently, a school district was forced to pay a fine when they showed a movie during a school district event.

Recently I finished a graduate program for my school district administrator certification. Like many graduate programs I needed to complete weekly assignments and research papers that required the proper citations. I’ve used several citation tools and my favorite tool to create my citations in the correct format is the free tool ZoteroBib.

I have been listening to podcast for years. I often listen to podcasts when I drive, work out at the gym, and cook dinner. They are a great way to stay updated on current events, listen to stories, and learn about something when you don’t have time to read on a regular basis. One of the podcasts I have been listening to over the past few months is NPR’s Lifekit.

I’ve been working recently with teachers on incorporating more blended learning strategies into their classroom instruction. This includes small group instruction, student paced learning, and an increase in instructional technology usage. With all of these different types of learning activities taking place at the same time the classroom can become very busy. It is important to have good systems in place and effective classroom management to ensure the classroom is functioning correctly.

This is an interesting project using artificial intelligence and data from the Social Security Administration to guess someone’s name. Enter your sex and the decade you were born then start to type your name to see how many guesses before the web app can figure out your name. Here is more from the creator:

This is based on data from the Social Security Administration, up to 2018. It’s relatively comprehensive, but there are a few limitations. First, it’s data for the United States, so the numbers don’t really apply elsewhere. Second, the SSA doesn’t include names with fewer than five people in a year, so the chart doesn’t cover more unique names. Third, there were no Social Security Numbers before 1935, so the name counts are fuzzier for years before that.

Before you enter anything, the chart shows the most popular names for the given sex and decade. Then as you enter a name, the chart shows conditional probabilities. The more information you give it, the stronger the guess.

I am a bit of a productivity geek. It is really interesting to find a new life hack that improves my day to day productivity and I like reading about how other people stay productive. Some of my favorite weekly articles are Lifehacker’s How I Work, Use This, and What’s in My Bag?. Along those themes I wanted to start documenting the tools I use to get things done and see how they change from year to year. So these are the products and services that help me stay productive.

On February 4, 2008 when I was 22 years old I got on a plane to fly to Denver, CO to start my term of service in AmeriCorps. If you aren’t fimiliar, AmeriCorps is a national service program that I often refer to as the domestic version of the PeaceCorps. There are many programs that fall under the AmeriCorps umbrella (one of the more popular programs is Teach for America) and I served in the National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC) which is a team based program for people between the ages of 18-24. AmeriCorps NCCC provided me with amazing experiences and life lessons that I continue to use today as an educator.

Good questions encourage learners to look at situations differently and often their answer can change as they learn new information. A strong essential question will allow students to keep revisiting that question throughout the school year as they explore different units of study. Here is a great resource of essential questions you can use for your courses, units, or lessons.

Recently I was working with a class and a teacher recorded several sample videos on their iPhone for students to use in a video project. By default, the iPhone uses a compressed format to save space on the device which isn’t always compatible with other tools. Here are directions on how to turn off that setting and use the more widely used JPG and MP4 media formats.