When you ask your students for help . . .

I was invited to create a one-credit class called "Emerging Technologies in Teaching" which will run this Winter. I wanted the perspective of my students so I asked Sean Mason (not shown) and Stacey Fenton (below) to drop what they were doing in LTEC 632 and give me some ideas.

Sean has been filling a spreadsheet with fantastic readings and suggestions for activities and yesterday, over coffee, Stacey Fenton and I sketched out a fantastic strategy we will use. 

Collaboration works.

McVey and Fenton wrapping the brainstorming with a selfie

ISTE's Award

Last week, at a conference (ECOO and BIT) in Ontario, I was honored to present ISTE's Making IT Happen jacket to Kim Gill, a legend in Canadian Ed Tech. I'm thoroughly enjoying my work on the Board of Directors.

5 emerging technologies that will 'disrupt' education over the next 5 years

5 Technologies that will disrupt (influence what we teach and students learn) education over the next 5 years
(per Braid Waid at the Mercy High Tech Talk on 11.2.18)

• AR (mass appeal; most appropriate for education; cheaper, easier to use)
• VR (high immersive experience to the individual)
• MR (Pikachu; the digital asset understands its environment)
• ML (machine learning) computers having the ability to learn without being specifically programmed; device recognizes your patterns and makes predictions
• AI - an intelligent agent that perceives its environment and makes decisions to maximize the chances of achieving its goals (e.g., Alexa, Siri, Google Home & formerly Microsoft’s PaperClip)

Some of these are in use today. What do you think about this? How has it affected you? How will it influence your teaching?

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

ISTE Certification

ISTE is promoting its new certification for Educators using their Educator Standards. Last week, Dr. McVey attended the mandatory two-day training session to become part of the first class of ISTE Certified Educators. This first step will be followed by 4 weeks of online training then he will have to put together a portfolio.

He is looking forward to sharing details of the process and perhaps even making EMU a Certified Authorizer Program. This article provides even more information about how ISTE is focusing on teachers and collaboration, rather than devices or software.