
Just a few thoughts about GTA…
What happens when you invite the latest and greatest educators to Google Teacher Academy in Mountain View? You become a family. The GTAMTV14 cohort is an amazing, talented, and inspirational group of teachers, administrators, coaches, and other educational professionals who were chosen to become Google Certified Teachers. Many of us met on July 29th at […]

GTAMTV14
I applied to Google Teacher Academy in Mountain View, California. My interim principal, Sr. Margaret, convinced me to do it at about 4pm on May 14th, about eight hours before the deadline. I created my video first, and I basically used Camtasia with Google Presentation and a ton of photos from the past year. You […]

Classroom Chromecasting: Quick and Easy
NOTE: Go to this link to see whether your device, including some Chromebooks, will work with Chromecast. We have wireless projectors at our school, but the technology wasn’t quite ready to stream videos without a lot of lag between the non-native app that our projectors required and the connecting devices. We tried messing with our […]

MERIT is…
life-changing, inspiring, amazing, awesome… I could go on forever. Making Education Relevant and Interactive through Technology (MERIT) is an educator professional development program at Foothill College’s Krause Center for Innovation. It is a year-long program in creating fun, engaging, learning-filled, student-centered environments in classrooms around the world. While most of the teachers accepted into MERIT […]

50 Things I’ve Learned about Teaching
I have been working in education for the past eight years, and I look back and see how I’ve developed my own (very strong) beliefs about teaching and learning. Many of these have been inspired by things I’ve learned through ed-tech conferences, teaching my own classes, reading, and being surrounded by great teachers on Twitter. […]

How to be successful with Google Chromebooks
I believe that the Google Chromebook is one of the best new tech products to come out in the past few years. Google had a very ambitious idea – to create a notebook or laptop format device that runs a customized Linux OS and boots right up to the Chrome browser that many of us […]

Twitter as Professional Development
I’ve had a user account on Twitter for several years (since 2009), but it wasn’t until December of 2011 that I started actively reading and tweeting. I think what got me back onto Twitter was the DreamForce (#DF11) cloud conference I attended in August. The genius CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, discussed the importance of […]
The Poverty Project
For the past few years, I have been doing a very special project with the eighth graders at our school. It covers curriculum in religion, social studies, language arts, science, and math – and it even uses technology throughout the lesson. For those in non-parochial schools, the religious aspect can be left out of it […]
Google Apps for Education
I will put a huge disclaimer up front: I am a complete, die-hard fan of Google, but I do not have any financial gain for recommending or using (or passionately advocating for) Google products. I started using Google in 1999, after leaving AltaVista search engine behind. My husband told me, “You’ve gotta check out this […]
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