Little Miss Geek

As you might have read in a previous post, my school district is going 1:1 Chromebooks in third through eighth grades. The past couple weeks we rolled out the middle school Chromebooks in our C(hr)ome Explore events. This week I helped organize and distribute Chromebooks to our Carpenter third, fourth, and fifth grade studnets. I also worked with each of the third grade classrooms as this was their first time logging in to their Google accounts and touching a Chromebook. It was a very exciting week!

This week I had the fortunate experience of attending and presenting at the CPS Googlepalooza event. Chicago Public Schools partnered with Google to put on what turned out to be a great event. On Monday all of the presenters were invited to the Chicago Google offices for a Power-Up event. I was super excited to get to go to the Google offices, and I loved the idea of having a special event to get the presenters "powered-up." Often times as a presenter you have little time to attend sessions and I loved getting the opportunity to learn, share, and get excited before heading off to present a couple days later. The day started with some presentations from David Tess, James Sanders, Jen Holland, and Jennie Mageria. I was able to learn about the Learning to Code with Google Apps Scripts course that +James Eichmiller and +David Tess created as a part of their Google Certified Teacher action plan. I found it very intriguing and I hope that in the future I can attend on...

This year our school district is going 1:1 with Chromebooks! (I'm just a little excited.) There has been a lot of work put in to prepare the students, teachers, administrators, community, and our network over the past several years. And this past week all of that hard work came to fruition, we had our first two nights of Chromebook pickup for the two middle schools. We'll have another two nights this coming week for the rest of our middle schoolers to get their Chromebooks, and the elementary students will have a device on their desk when they walk in the first day of school. The pick up nights went so smoothly, I just wanted to share some of the things that made it so successful. Over the summer the instructional technology coaches met and created a video that outlined the 1:1 for students and their families. It explained why the district chose to go 1:1, what they could expect it to look like, and what was expected of them. (Shoutout to  +Caroline Schaab  for pulling ev...

I'm not going to lie to you, there was a point during this summer that I was not looking forward to going back to school. If you know me, you know that I love my profession and my job. I think there were a lot of factors that contributed to this temporary lack of enthusiasm... some of my close friends and allies on my coach team at work are moving on to new opportunities, there is a lot of change in leadership in my district and I'm unsure of what things will look like, but mostly it was that I didn't slow down at all this summer and do the things that I usually do like spend copious amounts of time with my #miniman. All of these things combined left my enthusiasm tank super low, and I was in serious need of a fuel up. Angela Maiers with #leydenpride students  Last week I spent Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday fueling up at the Leyden 1:1 Symposium. The conference kicked off with the awesome Leyden team sharing their story with a Star Wars twist, which I of course shar...

I spent some time this afternoon with some friends from the area that had also gone to ISTE this year. We got together with the intent of sharing what we had learned while in Atlanta and reflecting on our time there. One thing that that we all said was that there really wasn't anything new and flashy for us.  +Nicole Zumpano  said that she was looking for some reinforcement for some ideas like Genius Hour that she had been toying with. +Charlene Chausis  found that she didn't really spend a whole lot of time in sessions but spent more time volunteering at the conference. For me, like I blogged about earlier, it was all about creating and building on connections with other educators because I can learn from them throughout the year, not just the week of ISTE. As we were discussing the different sessions that we did attend I was reminded of a conversation that I had with  +Steve Dembo  at the airport waiting for our flight which was delayed, just enough for us...