Skip to main content

Learning Together at MACUL: Anybody can Technology!

Our next MACUL experience comes to you from our guest blogger, Malena Schrauben.  Malena is a science/computer science teacher at CMS and inspires me daily with her enthusiasm and drive.  A week ago, she presented at the Mobile Learning Conference at KRESA about how she uses Scratch in her classroom.  However, it wasn't just her up in front of the audience.  She brought along several of her CMS students to share in the experience and show the audience the amazing projects they have been creating to demonstrate their learning in her class.  I couldn't have been more proud of the students, or their teacher!

Learning from my colleagues and teachers is one of my favorite parts of my job.  I am so lucky to work with these amazing Rock Star teachers.  Here is what Malena wished to share with all of us about her MACUL experience.
I loved attending MACUL! I would say my biggest takeaway was the amount of collaboration that took place among strangers. But we weren't strangers, we are teachers and that brought us together. Everyone was there to grow as an educator and it was amazing! We are all looking for ways to incorporate technology into our classroom and engage our students. We are all at different levels with our implementation and comfort. I hope all teachers take the opportunity to attend. Even if you come away with one AH HA! that is awesome! Two tools that I thought were great were wheeldecide.com and tagboard.com. Wheeldecide is a site you can visit and put categories onto a spilling wheel. It can be used to put students into groups or decide on topics for summative/formative assessments. I see myself using it to assign stations or activities in my class. I also loved tagboard, tagboard is a site you can visit to search hashtags. No matter what social media you are using you can pull up a hashtag. I use #doworkcms with my students. I also have both instagram and twitter accounts that I use for education and I can pull up work students have hashtagged or tweets/posts. MACUL also helped build my confidence level. We are all trying to be better, blend better, technology better. What better way than to do it together! :) 

Thank you so much, Malena, for sharing your experience!  We look forward to seeing the awesome ways you continue to use technology in your classroom.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Google Docs: Fonts for Early Elementary

Sample of search results from fonts.google.com A couple weeks ago, I was sitting in a training with a bunch of my favorite lower elementary teacher friends, and several of them were lamenting the fact that it is hard to find "good" Google fonts for the little people they work with on a daily basis.  Specifically, it is a challenge to find the single story lower case a and the open 4 .  This conversation, of course, sent me out on a mission to remedy this for these fantastic people.  So, the next day I put on my headphones, turned up the tunes on Spotify, and dived into the website fonts.google.com .  This website lists all the Google fonts available.  It also allows you to type in your own letters and numbers and see them in all the various fonts.  For my purpose, I typed in "abckgy 1234 This is the font."  From here I could see all 877 fonts, and look specifically for the a   and the 4.  It was quite an adventure, and I came across a lot of really awesome font

It's time to change your password!

There are several times a year when it is important to change your password.  Your password will expire every 90 days. When your windows computer informs you that your password will be expiring soon, CHANGE IT THEN! It is also always a good idea to change your password before going on break so that you do not get locked out of your computer, email or gradebook.  Here is how you change your password from the school windows computers. On your Windows desktop/TEC computer , press the Alt, Ctrl and Delete buttons at the same time. Click on "Change a Password" on the menu below: Enter your username, if needed, and follow the directions on screen. If you are off site or working solely on a Chromebook , you can use the VDI (Virtual Desktop) to change your password.   Simply go to vdi.portageps.org.  Click "VMware Horizon HTML Access."  Click "Accept."  Login with your portage username (leave off the @portageps.org) and password.  Click "Login."  Cli

Skyward Tech Tip: Unlocking a Closed Grade Period

Have you recently attempted to change a grade from last quarter only to be met with the statement “ This Grade Period is closed for Grade Entry “? This occurs because the date for the end of a marking period or quarter has past and that grading period has been locked in the Skyward Gradebook. Below you will find the process for changing term grades, assignment scores, and other information from past grading periods. Google Docs Version Go to your gradebook Let’s start with the gradebook for the class where you need to make a change. In this example, we will be adding a score to a missing assignment and removing the incomplete grade from the quarter grade. (Note: The process to open or unlock the gradebook is the same regardless the change you need to make.) This change will be made for marking period three, Q3. In that marking period column, click on the “Options” dropdown button. From the Options dropdown, choose “Grade Posting Status for Term QX”, whe