The intersection of pedagogy and practice. Whether it’s high school science or corporate software training, these posts explore how we design effective learning experiences for humans.

Email Merge in the Classroom

A stylized illustration of a busy classroom environment. The image shows a man in a suit, viewed from the back, in front of a computer screen displaying an email application. The scene includes various classroom supplies and decorations, such as books, folders, and a clock on the wall. In the background, there are several students seated at desks, working on computers. The classroom is adorned with colorful books on shelves, a green chalkboard with diagrams, and white papers with notes on them

As a teacher of advanced high school students, I have such a different job than many of my peers in my building; but when I walk into my son’s elementary school, I can not get over how different his teacher’s day is from mine. I could never handle their job, and I would never want to try. 

However, secretly, I have always been a little bit curious/envious of the behavior management/parent communication apps that are available for elementary school teachers. ClassDojo looks like such a cool tool that I have my fingers crossed that one of my son’s teachers will use it so I can see what it is like.

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How to Create Better Visual Presentations- Nancy Duarte

I am a huge fan of Nancy Duarte’s presentation philosophy, I own three of her books, and I build my presentation rubrics in my class around her guidance. Here are two quick videos to serve as a starting point to make better presentations.

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Resources to Make Your Student’s Presentations Shine

You might imagine that I would be a big fan of using novel presentation technologies like Prezi or FlowVella. I am… sometimes… but pretty rarely. Much more frequently I would prefer to use Google Slides or PowerPoint. I also think it is a better idea to teach students how to use these ubiquitous tools rather than have them rely on a flashy and/or proprietary format.

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School Calendar CSV File

I am a big believer in the helpfulness of digital calendars. Both at home and school, I have detailed schedules marking out all of my temporal obligations for as far out into the future as I can.

My school, like I am sure many others, has a rotation schedule that matches no calendar software on the planet. For many years I was forced to copy and paste each of the four calendar permutations throughout the school year to get my class rotation into my school calendar.

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Prometheus TED Talk

I have a longer post about how I have students go through a reflection process for the presentations they give in my classes.

As part of my process for developing their presentation skills, we watch this video a few times and talk about all of the phenomenal displays of oration that Guy Pierce demonstrates in this video.

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