Teachers as Entrepreneurs

Today I met with a teacher, Jodi McMaster, at Harvest Elementary School in Saline, Michigan. A few years ago she had a breakthrough and developed an activity to teach vowel sounds to young children.

She then published her work privately and has sold thousands of books and hundreds of kits. Haven't we all had some good ideas we wanted to share with the world? I would urge all of you to consider stepping out of that zone of safety you may have created.

The vowels interact in the funniest of ways

Her kit is beginning to get very popular and today representatives from state government, local government, and EMU (I'm the bald guy), got to see her kit at work with her students.

The ISTE Certified Educator

This month, I received my ISTE Certified Educator badge. The process involved a two-day seminar, face-to-face, in Arlington, VA, back in August. This was followed by a month-long online program.

The tasks were not too daunting. The hard part was the portfolio requirement which asked participants to generate artifacts covering 24 of the ISTE for Educators standards elements.

I missed one or two and the points were fair(ish). For the standard covering Digital Citizenship, for example, I shared work my students did such as the development of TED-Ed Lessons. I was critiqued for embracing the "old, fear-based" approach to Digital Citizenship. Well, good call, I guess. Teacher Candidates need to start somewhere and need to have an idea of what to do when a student comes to them in crisis. But ISTE has a point that good Digital Citizenship should be more than a list of DON'Ts.

The certificate is good for two years.

Safety in Cyberspace

With Saline High School requiring students to have their own computers or Chromebooks, we have the potential to transform the way we teach and the way students learn. We also have the potential for additional headaches with damaged machines and drained batteries just the beginning.

Saline is a G-Suite school district. That means students and faculty have access to a full suite of Google applications. If you haven’t been paying attention you may be surprised at all the varied applications available to students and teachers that are from Google – from Docs and Sheets to Slides and Maps, the Google brand is hard to escape in the landscape of learning.



But each week we read of another breach of security and resulting leaked data, often affecting millions of users. The numbers can be numbing yet many users are still careless and fall for phishing scams or hand over our passwords far too readily.

Adults are slowly learning to hold our personal information closer to our chests and have embraced a new caution. I have seen longer passwords and two-factor authentication (where you log in once and then log in a second time through your smartphone). I have also seen people simply abandon social media entirely.

In September, Google quietly changed the way it had people sign into their popular browser, Chrome. When Google automatically signed you into Chrome just by using an application like Gmail, without any notification, that got the attention of cybersecurity experts around the world – including a few in our own backyard.

Google has since fixed that issue – or appeared to fix the issue but the whole experience has since made security experts increasingly leery. That said, after hearing from Saline’s own educational technology specialist and from members of a Michigan Ed Tech Specialists group, I feel a little better about the experience our students will have.

Chrome, with its helpful extensions, add-ons, and bookmarks is still relatively safe for students especially considering that using a Chromebook in school means they can only function with the permissions and tools allowed by their system administrator. I'm comfortable with that.

Published also in The Saline Post October 16, 2018