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Living in BETA: #COL16 Reflection

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Its official: I'm a Google Certified Innovator! And the experience was even more amazing and life-changing than I ever imagined. Even though its been six days since Boulder Springs, my brain is still overflowing and still processing all the information. But I'm going to try to make my reflections and takeaways as coherent as possible: The awesomeness that is Google. Be Googley. Without a doubt, Google is a truly innovative company with a unique culture and one of our earliest sessions was about Google Culture. A major aspect of their culture is having fun periodically at work. They have a rock wall, Photo Booth, stage for performances, foosball table, and more. While we were there, they brought in masseuses, caricature artist, ice cream truck, and planned ahead ice breakers and games. This got me thinking about how people tell students that school is their job. So if classes are their work, shouldn't it be fun too? I try to make learning fun with student ch...
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Down with the Sickness

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For many people, diseases and history are not two topics that go together; diseases are a scientific topic while history is, you know, the study of dead people. But if you examine the human experience throughout the centuries, you see that diseases have affected societies in a variety of ways. Since many of these historical diseases have been eradicated or cured with vaccines, the social effects of have been forgotten. But now we are seeing a reemergence of these diseases for a variety of reasons. Because of this connection, my sophomore students investigated disees and their effects as part of their project based learning of the Industrial Revolution. Unlike prior projects, this knowledge was not kept within the confines of the classroom; the final projects were donated to Valley Children’s Hospital in hopes of spreading awareness about historical diseases. The project was launched in November with a PearDeck where students viewed of several news reports of recent outbreaks: ...
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Save Time When Grading Students' Blogs

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In 2014, I have experimented with student blogging and loved it, minus one thing: how long it took me to grade. For each student, I would have to find their blog (typically collected into a Google Form), find the specific post (hopefully I didn't far behind in grading), read it and then find them in the grading system to enter the grade. This became twice as time consuming when I had students commenting on each other's blog as assignments. I tried having students copying and pasting their comments into a spreadsheet so I could keep better track, but many students forgot, pretended that they wrote a comment, or messed with each other's responses since it was an all access spreadsheet. I even tried doing everything in a spreadsheet where each student had a custom tab, but this was difficult to manage with seven classes and I wanted students to actually be publishing on a blog. After about three years, I feel like I have finally perfect system for myself: I have students p...
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