Reflections in Tech

I created a cool resource to help math teachers in our district navigate digital resources for mathematics instruction. This was a need for our educators as the NC Math Standards have been updated for this school year.  This site features an Awesome Table that is sortable via standard, cluster, or key word. It is my hope that this will be a valuable resource for teachers while planning lessons/units. Click here to access the site!

I earned this handy, dandy badge a couple months ago. It's a CETL Certification, which says I'm a Certified Educational Technology Leader. That's a mouthful, and a year ago, I would have said, "No way, I could never pass that test." I had been introduced to the COSN network, casually, on one of those casual BCPS 10 hour summer workdays.  I brushed it off as as "Yeah, right" possibility because my knowledge of the vastness that is technology leadership was not on my radar, at all.  Fast-forward to fall of 2017, and NCDPI announces that there is a partnership with COSN to provide a 2 day course, as well as the testing for CETL Certification. Lucky me, I got signed up, and found myself in Wake county for training in January. What a whirlwind of information; two straight days of information overload! At the conclusion of the training days we'd had about 4 weeks to study, as the test was scheduled for February 28th. I spent lots of time working through al...

For the past four years the North Carolina Digital Leaders Coaching Network (NCDLCN) has been a driving force in my growth as a coach.  I have been able to grow my professional network, stretch my thinking, grow through reflection, and put new ideas into practice.  The most recent NCDLCN session I participated in was an alumni session focussed on the concept of design thinking.  I didn't exactly know what I was getting into, but I knew that I would learn something new, be with my people, and have a blast. That I did. As part of the design thinking process each participant was paired with another to work through the process.  The best part of this partnership, was two-fold; my partner was Delaine, one of my mentees from the 2016-2017 cohort, and the purpose of the design thinking process we were to work through was to solve our partner's problem!  This was so powerful!  I love helping people solve their problems, mine, not-so-much.   At the end...

Summer time means summer reading!  I love seeing what other people are reading, sharing what I've read, and getting book recommendations from friends.  This morning I put together a very simple Google Site to display my summer reading, and thought I'd share a quick walk-through on how to do it! Here's my site:  https://sites.google.com/burke.k12.nc.us/wolfhopesummerreading/home

This adventure in learning began when one of my 6th grade science teachers approached me prior to spring break wanting to plan a BreakoutEDU game. She wanted a game based on the unit her students were wrapping up, Plants and Ecosystems.  I searched the BreakoutEDU webpage  without luck, and decided we'd have to create something to fit the needs of her and her students.  We met together and she was able to walk me through a good bit of the material, and we were able to bounce some puzzle ideas off one another.  She wanted to cover the cycles that take place in an ecosystem; water cycle, carbon cycle, photosynthesis, and pollination to name a few.  She also wanted to include different types of biomes, as well as a variety of flowering plants. Identifying the parts of a plant and symbiotic relationships rounded out our discussion that day. After our meeting I tried to get to work on designing puzzles to match our chosen topics, but my wheels were spinning, and ...

Recently, my family was gifted the movie, "Robots" and we watched it a handful of times, and the line, "See a need, fill a need" is one that resonated with me.  I believe that as educators we see lots of needs on a daily basis, but the filling of needs may be an area where we need some improvement. I got the opportunity to really live out the "See a need, fill a need" idea in our final meeting with our Burke County Global Educators Cohort (BCGEC). We kicked off our session with a Gripe Jam activity.   Jennie Magiera had shared this activity at NCTIES during her PD is not a 4 Letter Word session.  The Gripe Jam activity is a great way to think about challenges that we face as individuals, and then collectively brainstorm ways to address the challenges. One of the collaborative conversations that took place as a result of our Gripe Jam was a need for a collection of technology resources that could be categorized and searched in order find an appropriate...

I have the great opportunity to work with a team of fabulous people that I love to help, anyway I can.  This group of people was integral in helping me learn a very important lesson about asking for help.  Together, we participated in an escape room session in which we failed, because we didn't ask for a hint when we needed it.   I was adamant during the session that we could do it, without help, and yet in the end I left feeling like a failure.  In my mind, asking for help was an indication of weakness, and weakness is not good.  However, in the 'debrief' on the way home, I realized that had we asked for help we probably would have been successful, and would have felt pretty darn good about ourselves.   That was an eye opening lesson for me.   In the past I have rarely asked for help.  It was a personality flaw of mine, that goes along with my stubbornness, perfectionism, and procrastination... While these traits have helped me to stri...