Little Miss Geek

Yesterday I had the opportunity to participate in the GEG Chicago Leadership Day at the new Goggle offices. We kicked off the day with some networking and team building -- it's always great to get to meet new people. Then we jumped right in working in teams to craft a mission statement for the GEG that would guide our work for the rest of the day. After several iterations we landed on "Empowering Educators to Innovate, Collaborate, and Inspire." From there we started the design thinking process around professional development and events that we could organize for the members of the GEG. Event ideas were voted on and people broke in to teams based on interest to begin planning. Overall the day was a huge success and I can't wait to see all of these plans come to fruition!

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 t...

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...

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...