Little Miss Geek

I spend a lot of my time and energy volunteering in different roles for the Illinois Computing Educators organization. Attending the ICE Conference and volunteering for the organization has helped me to grow as a professional in so many ways it's almost too hard to separate it from everything else. One of the things that ICE has been talking about doing for awhile now is hosting a twitter chat to engage it's members. After lots of conversations and planning the ICE Professional Development team,  +Mike McGowan  and  +Nicole Zumpano , and the ICE Communications team,  +Jennifer Smith ,  +Carrie Baughcum , and myself, along with the Executive Director of ICE,  +Margaret Johnson , and  +Paul Solarz  finally got the ICE twitter chats ball rolling. We marketed through social media and email campaigns working hard to get the word out. Our first #ICEilchat took place on September 25th, and the chat was centered around being a connected educator. W...

#EdCampIL was one of the best EdCamps I have ever been to, and I'm not just saying that because I helped organize it. There were a ton of EdCamp newbies there, which was very exciting. I remember my first EdCamp I was a little scared to jump in. I didn't know very many people and I wasn't sure that I had much to contribute to the conversation. Needless to say my hesitance has been quelled, learning and sharing at EdCamps, on Social Media, on this blog, and in the world has become my heartsong. Anyway, enough about me and back to the point, all of the EdCamp newbies last weekend were not hesitant, they jumped in and asked questions. It was awesome! I loved getting to meet all of these new people.  One of the best sessions I went to was the Collaborative Coaching session. I was overwhelmed by the number of instructional and technology coaches there were. Sometimes I think it is easy to feel like an island when you're the only coach in your building or in many cases...

There has been a lot of changes in technology in our school district this school year. Heck, there have been a lot of changes in our education system period. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, actually there's a lot of positive things about changing and growing. I believe that a lot of educators are stressed over all of the changes that are happening. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Half of America’s public school teachers say they feel great stress several days a week and are so demoralized that their level of satisfaction has dropped 23 percentage points since 2008 and is at its lowest in 25 years, according to an annual survey of educators." I live in the growth mindset of always trying to grow and better myself and those around me. I'm not sure how to live any other way, but it can be quite exhausting sometimes. When you're always looking for ways to improve it can be easy to forget or overlook all of the things that were great this time around....

Companies come out with new products all the time, but that doesn't mean they stop working on and developing those products. The newly released product is the best version at that time. When companies stop developing and improving on it, that is when that product begins to get outdate and lose value. Life doesn't get better by chance, it gets better by change. No one can go back and make a new beginning but anyone can change and make a new ending.  - Jim Rohn I believe that today I am the best version of myself. But, tomorrow, tomorrow I will work to be an even better version of myself. Never will I be a finished product, because there is always something I can improve on. That doesn't mean that I'm not happy with where I am right now in this moment. I take time on a daily basis to reflect. By reflecting I have an opportunity to celebrate my successes and the growth that I have already made, and also find things that I can do better in the future - opportunities ...

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...