It’s almost October and many teachers are settling into a routine at school, be it virtual, face to face, or some variation in between. Given this routine, now may be the perfect time to take your current tech practices to the next level. Whether adding a new tool to your toolbox or simply increasing functionality…
Google Slides remains to be one of my favorite of the G Suite tools. It is so versatile and can be used for a variety of purposes. This post continues my series on back-to-school tech tools. There are endless uses for Google Slides when teaching music! Many of them were discussed in my previous post,…
Last week my school district made what I’m sure was a tough decision: we will start the year virtually. While I know there are many viewpoints on this subject, I’m not here to debate them, I feel relieved that I can now make plans for this upcoming, unprecedented, school year. A lot of the content…
One of my favorite things in the summer is to catch up on all the books I purchased during the school year and didn’t have time to read. I buy them with the best intentions, but it will often take weeks or even months to finish reading one book. In March, right before the world…
With the quick transition to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, many music educators found themselves needing a “crash course” in technology. Being savvy, forward-thinking educators, they made it happen one Google search, Seesaw post, and virtual classroom at a time. Now that we’ve most returned to the classrooms and have had some time to…
I’ve always enjoyed creating digital resources, and now, teaching remotely, it is even more important. While this post isn’t directly teaching related, hopefully it will be useful when creating things for your classes. The following four tools are ones that I can’t live without when it comes to designing digital media. In fact, I imagine…
Over the last few weeks I’ve said several times that trying to recreate our classrooms while distance learning isn’t where we should put our energy. The two aren’t the same, especially considering the fact that this isn’t exactly “distance learning” – it’s attempting education during a pandemic. Instead, we should Focus on What We Can…
In my last blog post, Focus on What We Can Do, I discussed how during distance learning we cannot try to replicate everything we did in our classrooms. It’s not the same and we can’t try to make it that way. Instead, by focusing on what we can do now, there are numerous ways we…
Many of us have been in this new “distance learning” phase for a few weeks now – or as A.J. Juliani calls it “emergency remote learning.” Whatever term you use, we’re discovering that it’s not the same. We can’t replicate what happens in our classrooms online. And that’s ok. I think instead we need to…
This is another unintended, yet timely post about technology tools I’ve been using recently. Last time I wrote about using Flipgrid to maintain community in music classes. This post is also about Flipgrid, but how teachers can use it to easily create video content when suddenly faced with teaching digitally. Recently I’ve had the need…