Pay it Forward

I have many blessings in my life.  This time of year is a great time to think about that, and reflect on a past year.  We have top 10 lists from 2014 circulating the internet and talk show circuit.  We also get time off from school as teachers and students, so that provides the opportunity to really ponder our blessings and struggles.

One of the blessings that I have seen this year is the further mission of Pay Away The Layaway's mission to help kids whose families are struggling to have a great holiday.  The founder, Lee Karchawer, even has called himself the "Jewish Santa" from time to time!  The organization vets layaway accounts at stores like Walmart, Kmart, ToysRUs, and others to find people who have been struggling to pay down their layaway and have children's items.  Mr. Goshen High School, Tom Giordano chose this organization to be a part of his charitable donations and had a major impact in NY's Hudson Valley.  

I was thrilled that I was able to be a back-up dancer in Tom's performance for Mr. GHS pageant with colleagues so that we could help him bring home money to be raised for Pay Away The Layaway.  I mean, we danced to the song "Happy" by Pharrell and our goal was to make kids around the country Happy! As Minions! 

I drove 700 miles from NY to northern Indiana to visit my wife's family for Christmas.  That was quite a trip with 2 kids and the dog in the car for 12 hours!  She asked me what I wanted to do while I was out here, and if you've ever traveled to visit family and stay at their home, sometimes there is not much you want to do.  I told her all I want to do is excercise daily, and participate in Pay Away the Layaway.  

Lee from Pay Away the Layaway connected with KMART in Mishawaka, IN and I was able to go on Monday 12/22/14 to help pay about $2,500 of layaway bills for needy folks!  Steve, seen with me in the picture above is a special store manager who really catches the vision of helping people and doing things to advocate for the needy even in his commercial store.  It was a special time and many tears flowed of sharing great times with these people.  Many were truly in need and felt a special blessing of Christmas time!  It was very special, and I am thrilled to be able to pay this blessing forward.  Here is a clip from the news station that covered our story.  

Fox 28: South Bend, IN Pay Away the Layaway

The article is great as well: Read about it here.

Pay Away the Layaway takes donations from regular people like you and me in order to help make the lives of some needy children have a special holiday.  Please consider remembering them in your yearly donations.  They truly make a difference in peoples' lives!

Frozen as a Horror movie

There is always something special about remixes. People love them in music when two songs get mashed-up, or when fresh beats get put to an existing song.

In teaching Participation in Government we were studying political advertisements for the midterm elections as well as throughout history since 1960.  Most famously, the "Daisy Girl" ad showed a nuclear bomb going off within the pupil of a toddler to scare people into voting. Throughout the 2014 midterm elections, it seemed that the ads were just as bad with scare tactics.  Have you noticed how scared we were supposed to be about ISIS and Ebola before the election, and now it has disappeared from the news? Blame the candidates' ads from both sides of the aisle for trying to instill fear in us.

My students saw right through all of this. 

I decided to ask my students to make fake political ads through YouTube video editor. I like how that tool is online and offers filters and layers like other "more powerful" editors like iMovie. In trying to teach them about how colors and audio can change an perspective, I came across a great Frozen parody. I put these two videos side by side for them. One is the trailer for Frozen, and one is a trailer for Frozen if it were a horror movie! It is an epic difference and it just may ruin your perception of Frozen, but I think it's magic for teaching propaganda. Watch the juxtaposition below, just don't show your toddlers!

Official Disney Frozen Trailer

If Frozen Were a Horror Movie

We're all becoming Cyborgs

This TED Talk really hit me this week.  It was published in 2010, but is more relevant than ever.

This week we are all commemorating the Hour of Code and even President Obama is celebrating! My kids are 3.5 and 1 yr old, and they are already like little cyborgs. Logan can't get enough of making himself into a Cyborg!

It brings up the pedagocial question: If we have all the information the world possesses accessible all the time, then how do we ask better questions?  

We need to break the glass ceiling in education.  What if our kids are no better than trained fleas?

What good is a cyborg who can't jump out of the jar?

Online Assessments

It's funny sometimes in Educational Technology how the rate and pace of change comes differently for different components of tech. For instance, in my district we were on the SMARTBoard bandwagon early, but slow on the ELMO integration.  Priorities, finances, and mandates come into play when choosing to integrate different technologies.  I'm happy that my district chose to update student / teaching tools as a priority for the past few years before we moved too far to get teacher tools for productivity in assessment. Data is not a bad word as some make it out to be. Data is helpful especially when it's timely and efficient to use. I'm not always happy with all of the programs that we use for looking at student information, but today I used the online component of Sunguard Performance Plus to gather info on my students through a quick quiz. It was easy to set up and I ran the test entirely paperlessly. I got the results and was able to move on to teach a lesson based on needs which appeared instantly in their assessments. It's not a bad program, and data is not the devil. I just need to convince some of my colleagues. 

By the way Subguard, I didn't need a 2 hour webinar to figure this out... 15 minutes was perfect. This may just revolutionize my classroom instruction yet again. I'm excited to move forward with this tool.

Coding with the Griswolds

ABC Family and many other networks have begun the never ending run of Christmas movies after Thanksgiving (I guess they end after Christmas itself) and it got me thinking about school.  

With the trending maker movement for K-12 schools, and the introduction of Coding  as a skill for the students to learn, it got me thinking of a project.  

I would bring down my entire neighborhood and run up the electric bill if I could get this setup to teach my kids to code...

But maybe something more like this... with a dubstep

What if our schools brought this kind of project on board in order to bring community involvement and student interaction together?

Merry Christmas folks.

NYSCATE presentation

This past week I was able to attend, and present at the annual NYSCATE (New York State Computers And Technology in Education) conference in Rochester, NY. This is the 4th or 5th time I have gone to the conference and it's always amazing.  I would have gone last year except my wife was 9 months pregnant with our 2nd child!

I had to laugh about being chosen to present at this conference because my topic seemed underwhelming.  The last day of school last year was the final day for the Request For Proposals for NYSCATE, and I thought that the most relevant NEW technology to talk about was Google Classroom.  Google released Classroom after realizing that people were writing scripts for schools to help teachers send and receive work through Drive more easily.  Classroom was released in beta mode to teachers on an application basis in the spring.  Therefore, I decided I would commit this fall to trying it, then give a talk on "Google Classroom: An Early Adopter's View."  At the end of August, they released it to the public!  My "Early Adopter" view was now incorporating views from MANY other teachers and students in my school district!  People who are not even tech savvy adopted the program!

I made a video about their experiences to share with the group of my session and it can be seen here:

I thought the session would not have many people in attendance.  There were many things working against me such as the time on Sunday and the fact that I thought the program was so simple that people would have figured it out on their own already!  I was thrilled that my session had standing room only and people were excited to learn more.  They were engaged and many stuck around to give me some great feedback!  One even picked up some of my tab at Dinosaur BBQ that night!  It was a great experience to present, and I hope to get back and do it again another time.

I went alone to this conference, and ended up connecting with many wonderful educators whom I am thrilled to be connected with as a professional network moving forward.