What’s your intent? Design, intention and planning

In two presentations at TCEA’s Tecsig conference, David Jakes thoughtfully approached how we make our spaces reflect what we know about learning and teaching.  Whenever we approach a learning space, shouldn’t we approach it with intent and thoughtfulness?  Yet how often do we actually do that?  Or how often do we revert to known formulas, room configurations and furnishings? “The first step in rethinking the classroom is to disregard the notion that it has to be a classroom.” – D. Jakes What leads us to […]

Upcoming workshops at TCEA conference

I’ll be presenting all this week at the Texas Computer Educator Association conference in Austin (as well as learning at Tuesday’s Edubloggercon and other sessions!) If you are interested in following along here are the presentation topics and times: Tuesday, 1:30 – 2:14   Twitterlution:  Changing Advocacy I’ll be talking Twitter, and its role in revolutions, and as Diane Cordell says, contributions and evolutions, as well, and how we can apply lessons learned to education. Wednesday 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.   How To:  live blogging class discussions […]

TCEA tools “brain dump”

The sessions I attended at this year’s TCEA conference in Austin were wide-ranging, so it’ll take a little reflection to post all of them.  But first, a little “tool-sharing” is in order. First off, Elaine Plybon’s session on paperless classrooms and how she maximizes the use of various tools to reduce paper use in her classroom was very intriguing. Some ideas she shared that I thought were of value: –Use Voicethread or a flipcam to record instructions for your lessons when you are absent. That […]

TCEA Presentation–Facebook uses in education

Our school is making efforts to allow teachers to use professional facebook accounts to communicate with their students.  Dustin Windsor, our technology coordinator, and I shared in a session at TCEA how our school embarked on this process.  The slides and notes from our presentation are below. Links to resource materials we used as a district to make this decision. TCEA 2011 on Prezi