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.

Ken Burns is well know for many of his well made historical documentaries which include primary source documents, images, and archival video footage. These videos are a great classroom resource because they help to illustrate important moments in history. Educators can now access clips from these documentaries and supplemental resources on the PBS Learning Media website.

I learned about Breakout EDU from the middle school librarian (Chris Cassidy) in my district. She has been creating and adapting Breakout EDU lessons over the past few years for middle school classes on topics in English language arts, social studies, and math. We have also worked to demonstrate how to use Breakout EDU with other teachers in the middle school as well as elementary schools in our district. Here are some tips to help you get started with using Breakout EDU activities in your classroom.

Pam Hubler describes how a choice board can be used to explain the ways you can support teachers:

Elementary school teachers are usually more familiar with the role an Instructional Coach plays in their schools, but not as much in Middle School. To help clarify, I decided to take our district job assurances and make them public so teachers knew what was required of me on a daily basis. I took it a step further and made a “Choice Board” for my “services” so teachers had some ideas of how I can help them and/or their students.

Fun fact: while I always wanted to work in education I thought I would be a social studies teacher instead of an educational technology specialist. To make myself more marketable I become certified as an educational technology specialist. Since there have been more opportunities for positions as an educational technology specialists that is where I have worked. I will always have a soft spot for social studies content and a great resource for finding supplemental resources as well as full lessons is iCivics.

As I have discussed before, copyright is a very complicated topic and it can be confusing to know when you have permission to use content in your classroom. One of the questions I receive a few times a year is if teachers can show a movie from a video streaming service like Netflix or Amazon Prime in their classroom. Before showing a video from Netflix in your classroom you will need to do some research.

PowerPoint, Google Slides, or other presentation tools make it easy to organize and deliver content to your audience. Educators can keep their audience more engaged during these presentations by embedding interactive activities. Mentimeter is an easy to use tool to create interactive elements for your presentations.