Utah’s Online School Library (UOSL) is a virtual library designed for all Utah publicly-funded K-12 students and teachers. UOSL allows users to research and share resources from databases, including Culture Grams, EBSCO, Gale Reference, Scrible, Soundzabound, eMedia, and Preschool Pathways. UOSL provides a model for other organizations to fulfill the needs of educators and learners in their own constituencies. The reference materials in UOSL are designed to support “lifelong skills of selecting information from a wide variety of sources, assessing its worth, and applying newfound knowledge to problems, preparing them for learning, doing, and problem-solving in college, career, and throughout life.” (Utah Core Information Literacy Standards). Come learn with UOSL!

Educator podcasts are an effective and timely way to provide professional development and allow educators to share their stories. Through collaboration between three Utah educator podcasts, we have created an educator podcast network that helps provide opportunities and professional development to educators from Utah and beyond.

One of the most important things when implementing new technologies into a system, particularly an educational system is to try and understand the different ways it might affect different levels of the organization. I worked in restaurants for a long time in college.

The last few weeks of my work life have revolved around artificial intelligence. I am working on a course for Utah Education Network on AI in schools called The AI Frontier. The course is meant to be an introduction to AI in classrooms beyond trying out an AI and seeing what it can help you do (albeit sometimes poorly).

If you go to ISTE23 in Philadelphia this year, make sure that you make some time for Playgrounds. They are short table presentations by experts all centered around the same topic and they help to get some personal connections to content and ask your questions to experts who can help you build your understanding.

When I was a kid I really wanted to make videos. Being able to capture and then slice together scenes to make a movie was always so intriguing. I remember watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade too many times as a teenager and just loving how scenes were cut to make movement or tension. However, I didn’t have a camera or a computer that would edit footage or a school with those tools. So, out of practicality, I put those aspirations on the shelf until I was a teacher.

One of the fundamental issues facing educators is a two-fold problem. One is the amount of attention we are able to give each day to the larger educator community. Whether it is a new program in your school, a strategy from your local or state board, or a blog post from a national figure, finding attention to give each day come be complex and difficult.

I attended my first UCET in 2018. I had just come back from SXSWEDU week and I was on fire for more ideas and community. At the suggestion of my good friend, Quin Henderson, I headed to the University of Utah and joined the conference. I was excited to talk to a lot of the speakers as part of our podcast project at the time, Edtrex Rewind, and to just take in the conference. It was the first time that I had attended a state-level education conference and I was tickled by how much fun I had throughout the event.

Before I was a technology trainer I was an ELA teacher for a very long time in my career. I loved teaching novels and engaging students in the writing process. Teaching students to engage with their own ideas about specific topics and to build connections with the larger world through writing still is one of the favorite parts of my career. I was lucky enough to have administrators that understood my love of technology, and the skills I have for writing grants to bring that technology to my classroom.

A couple of months ago I was asked Katie Garrett, an associate director at UEN, to help a group of college and graduate students explore podcasting. These students were from the American Indian Resource Center and were developing a podcast to highlight the work of the AIRC. They also wanted to explore the issues facing American Indians who are in college or graduate school. We spent an hour or so together developing ideas, touring the studio, and recording their voices for the first time.

Last year at this time, I was working on developing a course for Utah Education Network. The course was, and still is, a passion project for me.

What I really love in podcasting is when you get a group of people with disparate backgrounds and they, without planning, synchronize their comments.

Artificial Intelligence is a topic that almost immediately makes for panic. I don’t know if it is the philosophical idea of humans creating intelligence or the demonization of AI through popular science fiction (looking at you Matrix, Transcendence, and about a dozen other movies), but every time AI is brought up, even pre-Chat GPT, it felt like the air was moving out of the room. AI is a tool and should be thought of as such. Like cassette tapes to the recording industry, AI is being worried about as a way for students to do less thinking and writing.

Open Educational Resources, or OER, is an underutilized part of education. I know many educators who head first to Teachers Pay Teachers rather than spending time looking for something in OER.

We are four episodes deep into Get Googley and I just keep digging into my comedic tool belt (which is very shallow). This time it was writing New Year’s resolutions.

There are conversations that I have as a podcast interviewer that I wish could go on forever. Speaking to them for hours and hours just sounds like a delightful way to spend the day. Often it is because the interview sits in this great sweet spot of my own personal interest in the subject and the interviewees are so knowledgeable and engaged in their own work that their passion just shines. Dani and my interview with KnowledgeWorks experts Virgel and Lillian were one of these interviews.

Anyone who has spent more than a few weeks working with educational technology starts to see a growing mass of tools and curricular moves, webinars and update after update after update. It is a lot to pay attention to and build a structure for your classroom. So many directions and so many of them are seemingly overwhelming.

In October, I was priviledged to present to our Utah C-Forum group about some creative projects that I have been a part of recently. First off, I taught a bit of photography including ghost photography, digital badges, and solarized portraits (example to the right). I also taught a bit about how to record and use podcasts in your classroom. It was such a great experience to share all the creative processes that I have been using in my work.

A few years ago I was fascinated with Adobe Character Animator. I had my yearbook students make their own avatars and then make photography explainer videos. It was just so much fun to play around with little cartoons and make a video with my voice. Adobe just upped the game with a web version that relies on an audio recording of your voice. It takes that recording, auto animates to your voice including arm and head movements. The whole process of making the video to the right took me about 10 minutes

Over the past few years, I have been privileged to be a part of the discussion surrounding Personalized, Competency-Based Learning in Utah. I started out as a teacher of record on the advisory committee meetings, now as a statewide trainer, I have been able to develop courses and lead sessions on PCBL and the framework within Utah and beyond. It is work that makes me proud to work in Utah education.