My PLN

This week I have been in the process of building a professional learning community through the use of both Twitter and Diigo.  I have used Twitter as a way to get my news and as a way to connect to parents and teachers, but I never really thought of it as a way to get professional development.  When you think about it, it really is perfect because you shouldn't have to wait for a PD Day to learn something new and if you have a minute and want to get better, you could read some tweets.  As you learn about new tools and sites to use to teach students, you can log and categorize them with Diigo, a tool that allows you to bookmark with the best of them.

In the process of finding a few people to follow and resources to add to my Diigo page, I stumbled across Quizalize, which I am really excited to try.  From what I have seen, it communicates with my Google Classroom account and students take a quiz with lots of different and interesting style of questioning techniques.  Also, the students can play against each other in groups.  No student data is shared, only team data.  You can get an idea of how quizalize works here:

I plan to use this as review for my upcoming unit and will let you know how it works, especially with Google Classroom!

My First Post

Welcome to my blog!  I teach middle school science at Plaza Middle School in Kansas City.  I am starting this blog first as an assignment for my Master's program, but hope to share many of the ways that I use Google Classroom with my students.  I am not new to the world of blogging.  When my son was born 4 years ago, my wife and I ran a blog about the pregnancy through Nolan's first birthday to share with family and friends.

This week in class, I learned about Feedly, a program that combines different sites that utilize RSS feeds.  I had used the old Google Reader mainly for news stories and when that went dark, I moved to Twitter, which has its own limitations, 140 of them to be exact.  I had also started to use Pinterest this summer, but have not used it much because when I have gone to Pinterest for educational projects that I was looking for, I ran into the Teachers Pay Teachers dead end.  I think that the Feedly blog will really help to keep on top of the different blogs that I find to be very engaging and helpful.

The first blog that I have found helpful is Digital Inspiration: Tech a la Carte which I have found time and time again when I am trying to solve a problem using the Google Platform.  A strength of using Google products over Microsoft Office (other than the share-ability) is the flexibility being an online program.  The developers of Google can tweak the program, but those tweaks sometimes can drive the users of Google products go crazy.  "Where do I...?" and "Well, it was here..." are common place if you use Google products because of the on-the-fly changes that are made.  Many of the times that I have looked for these kinds of updates, I have ended up at Digital Inspiration with an easy to follow how to answer.  Let's make this clear.  I am not a programmer, but a heavy user.  They speak my language and I hope they speak yours!