Podcasting With a Purpose: Creating a Utah Educator Podcast Network
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.
UEN Homeroom on AI in Education
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.
TEDTalk Share - Recent AI Talks
There is just so much out there on artificial intelligence right now. Just spending a few minutes exploring social media and what is being said by experts, armchair experts, and laypeople alike can make it hard to discern the best responses to AI’s boom over the last few months.
UEN Homeroom with Dr. Scott McLeod
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.
Resource Share - SlidesGPT
I, like many of us in educational technology, have been somewhat taken away by AI over the last few months. ChatGPT, Dall e, and Midjourney have been weekly, if not daily, topics of discussion, along with AI policy, frameworks, assignments, and assessments in education. For example, just in the past week I have run an edcamp session on AI in schools, developed coursework for an AI course, and shared a presentation with a local educator team on creativity and AI.
Get Googley - Video Resources on Docs, Slides, and Forms
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.
Keynote Share - Curating Curiosity: Using Creativity in the ELA Classroom
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.
UEN Homeroom with Students from the Amerian Indian Resource Center
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.
UEN Homeroom Podcast - “Music In The Utah Classroom”
What I really love in podcasting is when you get a group of people with disparate backgrounds and they, without planning, synchronize their comments.
Get Googley Ep. 4 - Calendar Hacks for the New Year
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.
UEN Course: Designing Future Classrooms
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.
Utah Teacher Fellows Podcast
Last year on UEN Homeroom, Dani and I were lucky enough to have an amazing conversation about how to approach teaching Native American culture in Utah classrooms and some of the best practices. The conversation was a great discussion with two wonderful educators from BYU, Heather Francis and Brenda Beyal. This year, thanks to the Utah Teacher Fellows Podcast and guest host Natalie Johnson, there is a follow-up to that conversation. Brenda Beyal returns with the director of the Native American Curriculum Initiative, Cally Flox. Come learn about the Native American Curriculum Initiative at BYU and how it is helping to transform how Utah educators are discussing Native cultures.
UCET Podcast: USBE’s Digital Teaching & Learning Team
Working on audio and producing podcasts has been one of my favorite professional activities for the past few years. Podcasts are places where anyone can tell their stories to a larger audience and be heard. I am lucky to get to produce this podcast with Kiera and this month’s podcast provides some great insight into one of the innovative teams in Utah: Utah State Board of Education’s Digital Teaching & Learning Team. As a team, they support so many activities throughout the state, but two key activities have played a key role in many educators’ lives: the Digital Teaching and Learning Grant, which has provided funding for Utah schools to provide updated tech to teachers and students, and the Personalized, Competency-Based Learning grant, which encourages student choice and voice in our schools. Check out the podcast to learn more about this group, their work, and how it has influenced technology use and culture in Utah schools.
Creative Presentations from Utah’s C-Forum
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.
Utah PCBL / Aurora Institute Article
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.
UEN Homeroom: Utah’s First Lady Abby Cox
Earlier this month Dani and I were lucky enough to sit down with Utah’s First Lady Abby Cox and her Deputy Director of First Lady Initiatives Sarah Allred about the Show Up for Teachers Conference. If you are a Utah educator and you did not attend the summer conference, make sure to look for announcements for next Summer’s conference. As you will hear in the podcast, the goal of Show Up for Teachers was to help them feel pampered. From point one entering the conference, I felt it.