Little Miss Geek

This summer I taught Video Game Design and Crazy for Coding classes to fourth and fifth graders. As I was helping some of my Coding students create in Scratch I had the crazy idea of creating a Google Teacher Academy video game. I spent some time playing with the idea. I found some images online (that were Creative Commons licensed of course) and started to piece them together in Scratch. I hated it and decided to scratch the idea of creating a GTA game all together.  A little known fact about me ... I LOVE Google Draw! I use it on pretty much a daily basis for a wide variety of things. To me the possibilities are nearly endless. Right before leaving for Atlanta in ISTE I even used Google Draw to create my business cards. Later in the summer I was at the CPS Googlepalooza sitting in a Google Draw session led by the very awesome Jennie Magiera, and like a ton of bricks it hit me ... why was I looking for images online when I could create my own!  I started with making the hallwa

This school year my school district took Microsoft Office off all of the student devices. We now have iWork as well as Libreoffice, but using either of these choices mean that a student must complete the work on the device they started on. The majority of the work that our intermediate students do is on Google Docs, but up until now all of the primary students have been using Office. Well since they no longer have that as an option primary needed to find another option. After talking with all of the first and second grade teachers we decided to try and use Google Docs in conjunction with Google Classroom to help with file management. Using Google Apps will be a little challenging for our young learners because the login is much more difficult including capital letters, which is what they usually learn the first couple weeks, not to mention the @ and the length. I want to celebrate these teachers' willingness to take a risk and try something new. The past two weeks all of the firs