Aim to Be Awesome, Not Perfect

In my role as an Instructional Technology Specialist, I try to provide professional development and helpful hints in a variety of ways. One way I reach my staff is a weekly Tech Treats newsletter. This method can take a while.  At first, very few people read it, partly because it was buried in a principal's weekly memo. But it is catching on - especially as teachers learned they could bookmark it like a website and refer back to it as needed. It isn't at 100% - I don't think it ever will be - but it is enough that I will keep doing it. Want to make one for your staff?  Here are my tips: It's a Google Slide, because  It's easy to format  I add the newest slide at the beginning  It's easy for teachers to search to find previous pages It can be bookmarked  Put "need to know" stuff in there, especially action items with deadlines Include information for a variety of technology comfort levels Include new fun things - for Thanksgiving and C...

So way back in August, I started a post on my goals for the new school year. My goals: blog once a week better website skills  So how am I doing with these?  (insert laughter here) Well, if you follow this blog, or follow me on Twitter, you know that I haven't blogged hardly at all since the school year began.. so we know where I am in that goal.  My goal of better website skills ... well.. that became a different goal - the goal of communication. And it sharpened into 2 goals - better communication with the staff at my school and with our community.  My first goal stemmed from some complaints that information was hard to find, since it could be housed in a variety of places, based on who created it or its content. Also, there were a lot of files on our school server, but those are not reachable when you are at home and you can't open them if someone else is editing them.  One of my assistant principals floated the idea of a staff Google Si...

It's been such a long time since I blogged! It was my goal to start blogging more at the beginning of the school year, but we have started a lot of new initiatives on my campus and time got away from me. Here's what I have learned over the last 3 months. - One of my goals this year was to increase efficient communication. With the help of the assistant principals, we created a staff-only website. Before, there were lots of places where documents were housed, and for many documents, you had to email someone to request it, and then wait for them to reply. Now it is all housed in one spot. While it still a work in progress, and staff is still learning to check there first prior to email, it is an overall win for our team.  - Change can be hard.  - When you believe in something, sometimes you have to give more than you planned in order to make it succeed.  - It doesn't always pay off to be first. All the middle schools in my district received a 'broadcast' set...

While at ISTE last week, I heard this quite a few times - ‘they use Microsoft Office in business, so that’s what we should be using in schools’. On the airplane home, multiple people around me are working on their laptops, and most working in PowerPoint. After a few minutes of watching them, and thinking about what I heard at ISTE, here is my two cents.... I prefer Google products - which is obvious based on my Google certifications. But if tomorrow we switched to Office 365, would I be unable to do my job? Would I still be able to support teachers and demonstrate how to use technology in the classroom? The answer is yes. It doesn’t matter which is used - Microsoft Office or GSuite Apps - the skills are interchangeable. If we switched, I would still use Slides/PowerPoint to create my weekly Tech Tips newsletter. Students can still create fake Instagram posts or BookSnaps in Powerpoint, just like they do in Slides. Case in point - let’s say I teach a statistics class and my stu...