I was one of the first Instructional Technology Coaches hired by a school district in my county (usually regional educational service agencies do that sort of thing). That was four and a half years ago, and since then I’ve taken on a much more quasi-administrative role in my district. However, over the years I’ve gotten a lot of questions and requests for help in shaping similar roles in neighboring school districts. I share the original job description for my position, the interview process, and any other questions that come my way. I try to be helpful. I was contacted by another individual seeking input of this nature this week via Twitter, and was asked a very compelling and unique question. Typically people just want the job description, and a walk through of my average week. This individual wanted to know specifically "If you were on the hiring committee for an instructional technology coach, what questions would you ask?" The first time I was asked specifically about a list of questions about hiring a tech-savvy teacher, David Warlick blasted me for focusing too much on the educational side, and not enough on the technical. I thought I had created a fairly balanced list, which was published in the Winter 2007 issue of Interactive Educator (it’s a small side bar of "Do’s and Dont’s"). In retrospect, my original list of "do’s and dont’s" may have come down more heavily on the educational side of things, but I was speaking from my perspective then, and quite frankly, the questions that Mr. Warlick provided in return weren’t my cup of tea either.  So, in an attempt to provide an updated list of questions that better reflect my experience, and a more balanced approach, I’ve broken them up into three categories to get a feel for each role that an Instructional Technology Coach must play. Agree with me or not, this is where I would start and most likely would continue to refine the questions with the hiring committee until we felt as though each of these three categories were well represented, and could provide us with some meaningful insight as to who they are as an individual. Questions About Leadership - An instructional technology coach is a leader, first and foremost What experience do you have leading adults? How would you approach a teacher that just doesn’t want to "get on the bus?" An instructional coach needs support, what support would you need from an administrator? How would you help adult learners be accountable for achieving goals? Can you share an example of being a "team player" despite holding opinions contrary to your superior? Questions About Teaching - An instructional technology coach understands pedagogy and people Who is your educational hero, and why do they inspire you? How do you reflect on your personal beliefs and educational philosophy? A colleague tells you that they don’t believe in a learning philosophy or pedagogical viewpoint that you hold dear. How do you deal with that? What’s the single biggest similarity between adult learners and younger learners? The biggest difference? An administrator asks you to lead a workshop for a group of teachers you’ve never met. What’s the first thing you do when you walk into the room with them?  Questions About Technology - An instructional technology coach should posses an innate desire to "tinker" What’s the last thing you took apart, just to see how it worked? What’s the last thing you created because other resources out there weren’t good enough? How do you go about troubleshooting a technical problem? What does your digital footprint look like? What framework or set of tools do you employ to narrate, curate, and share your learning process?   image - question mark in esbjerg by Alexander Henning Drachmann

I’ve been trying to get back to playing with video at least once a week (it’s hard to squeeze it in with all of my other official work duties). Turns out, I should just take my own advice, and be ready with my camera more often when I’m out around town. There was a great opportunity to make a quick video story problem about estimation and proportional reasoning (thanks Aviva) today at the grocery store, and I got some nice cheddar out of it. Learning + food = a win in my book. I really need to find a way to turn all of these videos into something larger. There’s so much more below the surface, but I feel like I’m just scratching at it with a dull spade. For now, I’m enjoying getting back into the swing of creating them. P.S. Sorry for the unkempt face. I deserve a day off from shaving on a Saturday, right?

Creating insightful metaphors for explaining complicated technological systems that make concepts easily accessible for a wider audience can be a strength. Being able to turn those metaphors into colorful train wrecks of slightly off center explanations takes a particularly special talent. I like to think I’m capable of both. In this week’s episode of Tech Director Chat, Pete and I answer a number of questions that came out of our Technology Advisory Group meeting. It’s a monthly meeting that brings together educators and administrators from across the district. We talk geeky, share successes with technology, and address larger issues with technology within the district. Pete gets a bit geeky with the tech terminology, we talk about some of the failing technology in the district that’s reaching "end of life," why we can’t do anything at the moment about increasing bandwidth for teachers and students, and Pete is stumped once again. We really should start revisiting those questions to see if Pete really has answered them correctly You can go listen, download, or subscribe to the Podcast via iTunes using this link, or listen using the embedded player below. Timestamps for this week’s questions: 1:11 We didn’t have a snow day today? 1:34 Does Ben know how to read a calendar? 2:30 What’s our normal Help Ticket load at the start of the school year? 3:15 Why has it taken us longer to get ahead on the Help Tickets this year? 4:40 What has Pete been doing today? 5:22 JW asks about the plans to add technology to existing buildings. 8:15 What is the plan for upgrading our wireless infrastructure? 9:20 Pete describes what AP means in the technology world. 10:07 Ben attempts to explain basic networking for non techies. 11:04 Is it possible with our current wireless to increase bandwidth for students? 14:05 If we had all the money in the world, would we still have internet problems? 14:40 Is the Internet really a cloud, or more like a giant bowl of spaghetti? 15:15 JW wants to know if we have a "one size fits all" package for classroom technology? 20:05 Stump Pete: What was James Brown always talking to his band about? Tech Director Chat - Ben’s Tech Metaphors

This will not be a long or profound post (not that I have many profound thoughts to share). But I am having a blast rediscovering my love for video story problems….and peanut butter crackers. The grocery store is a bountiful gold mine of learning opportunities. Great real-world math is found on every shelf, and it provides students with an instant hook connected to common experiences. There’s nothing complicated with these video story problems; I’m quiet content to pump out examples for others to use, or inspire to create their own. I’ve actually got a pretty popular workshop developed around creating them (at least the feedback collected by attendees is always positive), and I’m constantly encouraged by the way educators take the idea and turn it into something engaging within their own content area. There, a simple post, just like I promised. As I look back at my last few postings, I find myself considering starting up a new blog; perhaps one based around all of the media I create, or perhaps around just the video story problems. I’m going to keep noodling on it, as I’m curious if I can attempt to maintain yet another space online. In the meantime, the increasingly eclectic nature of my blog marches on!

I had the opportunity to moderate the #michED chat this evening, around the community selected topic of "breaking down silos." We live most of our educational lives in silos; grade levels, content areas, middle school, high school, "smart kid", "dumb kid." Society encourages us to think of complex relationships and organizations, like schools, as simple silos. It’s not the worst thing in the world; it provides new teachers with uniformity and the ability to focus on just a few small goals at the start of one of the most trying careers anyone can imagine taking on. But there comes a time when we all need to break out of our silos in order to grow, and develop new ideas. I shared a simple, but encouraging, article from Edutopia about "Shattering Silos" by Ainissa Rameriz before the chat started. I know it breaks conventional "Twitter Chat" protocol to ask everyone to go read an article, or watch a video, before starting the chat. I wanted to get everyone’s attention before jumping into the tweet-fest of high fives that many Twitter chats can become. I think it worked. Several people were much more thoughtful during the chat, and it gave me time to compose myself in between the introductions and the first question. I deliberately slowed down the chat by asking fewer questions, and allowing more time for "dead air" from myself; the conversations that grew up were inspiring, and the side chats were plentiful. It felt good. I followed up the chat with a simple request that I was fearful no one would meet. I asked everyone to share one thought from another Twitter chat participant that they wanted to adopt and work with on their own. I feared it would land like a dud, with many confused that I was turning a casual, enjoyable conversation into something closer to "work." The response was magical. Not only did the #michED community answer my call, but the conversations and tweets continued well passed the end of the official chat hour. I consider myself blessed to work within an amazing network of educators here in Michigan; we may push one another, we may challenge one another, but we come together not to showcase our talents or steal a spot in the limelight. We come together to share ideas, build resources and ideas for the benefit of our learners, and through that we’ve broken down more silos than we could ever have hoped to level on our own. Below is the archive of the chat if you’re curious to see what it’s all about. View the story "#michED Chat, 11/19/14 "Breaking Down Silos"" on Storify

I’ve been blogging every weekday in November as an homage to the now defunct NaBloPoMo. Started in 2006, the "National Blog Post Month" movement was a response to the "National Novel Writing Month" event, in which writers across the web dedicate themselves to writing for sustained periods every day in November. The goal is to write a novel, or at least get a good start on one. The blogger’s parallel movement was to encourage a sustained effort to write around passionate topics, and help the fledging (at the time) blogging ecosystem. Even after the NaBloPoMo community was bought up by BlogHer, and turned into a "theme a month" community of writers comprised mostly of women, I still enjoy the challenge of trying to squeak out some thoughts on a regular basis in November. Sure, I cheat, and take the weekends off. It’s not a perfect practice of squeaking, but I’m enjoying it. Some days, I don’t have much to say. I may be exhausted, I may play extra hard with my kids, I may use up my evening time on chores, etc. On days like that, you get an animated GIF of a train of plastic toy cars. I made it during a trip to the library with my kids this evening. They had fun playing with the toys and getting new books; I got to play with my kids, and take some video to turn into a geeky loop of toy cars. It was a win/win.

"I don’t know, I found the picture on Google" How many times have you heard a student say that when asked to provide a source for an image they’ve used for a project? You can ask them to provide proper references. You can plead with them to use only "teacher approved" sites. You can craft an amazing framework or rubric to help them work through proper citations. You can even force them to use image websites specifically curated for educational use of photographs. The reality is, when you’re done scaffolding and supporting good habits in your classroom, most students leave and go right back to scouring Google for images, with little regard for how they might need to document the image, or whether they would need to claim fair use. I know, I’ve witnessed it. Heck, I do the same when I need an image in a pinch to liven up a document, or a quick presentation to a small group of teachers in my district. It’s accessible, it’s quick, it’s easy. And with the growth of Google Docs as the defacto word processor in many schools districts, it’s now the encouraged method of adding images to documents using Google’s own built in image search. Sure, you’re using images that are marked for commercial reuse and modification, but you’re still going through Google Image search. Students don’t always recognize the difference between the modified search within docs, and the open Google Image Search. I decided to take a different tact this week with students. I appealed to their more logical side, and crafted a simple activity that would show them how much more quickly they could deal with those "nagging" questions that teachers always ask them about images in projects: Who took the photo or owns it? What website did it come from? Do you have permission to use it? When you search via Google Images, those questions can sometimes be murky to answer, or take awhile to "click through" to find the original source of an image. However, when you use the Creative Commons Search, you’re directed more often than not to the original source of the image, giving you the answers to the three questions more readily, and with greater accuracy. Or so I theorized. And thus, I crafted an activity that I ran through two 8th grade classrooms this week in hopes that I could demonstrate how much more accurate (students didn’t seem to care), but much faster (many students were impressed with this) the Creative Commons search was compared to Google Image search. I grouped the students into small teams, and then "timed" them to answer the three questions above while trying to find a picture of a playground using Google Image Search. The fastest time was 56 seconds. Some groups didn’t even finish in the 3 minute time limit I gave them. Many of the groups were unsure if they could use the image, and several said they could, but they couldn’t articulate why. I then tasked them with the same search using the Creative Commons Search. None of the students had seen the Creative Commons Search website before, so I showed them quickly how it worked. And then they were timed again. The fastest time was 29 seconds, and ALL of the groups finished under the 2 minute 30 second mark. They answered every question with confidence, and they all knew why they could use the images, because the CC license was clearly stated alongside (or linked to) the image. Huzzah! I was at least able to show them that the Creative Commons Search is indeed faster for finding images, providing thorough documentation of the actual owner or originator of the image, and whether or not they had permission to use it (every image had a clear Creative Commons license that stipulated they could use it with at least attribution). The real question will be if the students care enough to change their "normal habits." My fear is they won’t. But I hope that the significant time saved while searching (multiplied over many images throughout the course of a project), and the unoquivocal answer of "can they use it" may start to turn a few students into converts outside of the classroom as well. Here’s to hope! As an aside, I created the "Creative Commons Search vs. Google Images" activity as a Google Document, and opened it up for anyone to critique, comment, or modify for their own use. Have a look, and help me make it better, steal it, or share it as you see fit!

I didn’t really appreciate the anxiety-filled position I was putting my Tech Director in each week in front of the microphone for this podcast. I don’t let him preview the questions; no prep, no word-smithing the perfect answer to a question, just a "think on your feet" response to questions. I didn’t appreciate that situation until he turned a question on me in this episode. It was a question that I’ve been thinking about a lot, but wasn’t quite ready to articulate. I think I took a good swing at it, but whiffed on his question about whether the majority of teachers will ever get passed the basic level of technology substituting other instructional methods using paper and pencil. My short answer….no. My longer answer….maybe. Once most schools have technology readily available, many practices that we’re currently pioneering will become commonplace. it will become status quo for students to word process every thought rather than writing. Which means digital writing, collaborating, and sharing will eventually be the new normal and thus will be ripe for substitution with future technologies and/or pedagogical practices (video, augmented reality, etc.). Like I said, it’s a complicated thought that I think I flubbed. Oh well, there’s always room to improve! As always, you can listen to, download, or subscribe to the podcast using this link. Or listen below! Timestamps for this week’s questions: 0:56 What has Pete been up to? 2:21 What does an exploding projector bulb sounds like? 3:00 Ben has opened the flood gate of questions by sending the podcast to all district employees. 4:16 JW asks, what is the big picture goal for teacher technology use in the classroom? 7:32 Pete asks Ben, how long do you think it will take until a majority of people are using technology for more than simple substitution? 11:20 John asks, why do some wifi routers behave differently for filtering? 14:50 John wants to know, can he have an Apple TV? 16:40 Kathleen asks, what would your ideal new elementary building look like? 20:45 Paul from Twitter asks, why are URL shorteners blocked by filters? 22:18 Stump Pete! 24:11 Kathleen asks, who was more influential to early Rock and Roll? Tech Director Chat - Ben’s Turn in the Hot Seat

I’ve been known to GIF my day on special occasions. Alan Levine even created an honorary #ds106 assignment in my name for the practice. And in honor of the the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States, I thought I’d take a day to share what I’m grateful for using the one of the media formats I’m most thankful for; the animated GIF! I’ll be revisiting this post through the day with updates, so stay tuned I’m thankful for my son, his unending appetite for curiosity, LEGOs, and breakfast cereal. I’m thankful for a good deal of people in my life, and I could easily fill several posts of those that have helped shape who I am. There may be a post or two along those lines in the coming months, but in the spirit of finding small moments of thanks throughout my day, I’ll let my son represent the close loved ones in my life. I’m thankful for the amazing safety and efficiency of our bus drivers at school. I’m thankful for the highly skilled and conscientious adults we have that transport students to and from school everyday in my district. We have nearly a quarter mile of school busses that pick up and drop off students every day during the week. When you have that many large vehicles stretched across the front of school buildings, hundreds of students pouring into and out of those buildings, parents and other cars moving around the parking lots, there’s a lot that could go wrong. While we have had other drivers run into our busses, we have never had an accident involving people or vehicles being hit by our busses, and for that I’m incredibly thankful. I’m thankful for my Tech Director, for allowing teachers in my district to install software and manage their own devices. I’m thankful for the forward thinking of our district’s Technology Director. Not only do we have powerful machines capable of allowing teachers and students to explore every nook and cranny of creativity they desire, but he also trusts teachers to manage their own devices. When my old copy of Adobe CS4 just doesn’t cut it anymore, I can download and install a newer version (provided I find a way to pay for it) when I’m ready; no waiting for a district admin for approval. I’m thankful for being able to work next to our middle school’s Life Management class. I’m thankful for being to work next to the Life Management class at our middle school, because it gives me the opportunity to peak in on all of the fun hand-made projects. I like to think of Life Management and Home Economics classes as part of the overlooked Maker Movement. The teacher in our middle school program has students sewing, designing their own popcorn flavorings, and even creating their own sewn circuits using conductive thread and arduinos. She’s partnered with local university teachers and students, and constantly pushes her students to explore what it means to "make." I’m thankful for the people in my life that buy me neon flashing vests to run in :) I’m thankful for the people in my life that are always looking out for me. I’ve been running for a little over 2 years now, and sometimes it can be a bit scary out there on the road, especially at night. This year has been especially bad with the poor weather coming on earlier. My mother and my aunt both bought me protective, neon, flashing, and otherwise garish (but important) outer running gear. I’m glad I have them to make up for my own stupidity. I’m thankful for still being young at heart…and having kids to play video games with me. I’m thankful for my ability to still be young at heart, a bit silly and goofy at times, and to be able to enjoy video games with my family. Sure, I still play video games on my own (I’m a huge nerd), but I’m glad that I have loved ones that enjoy playing games with me. And for the excellent rainbow paintings from my four-year old. It’s good to be comfortable with the youth inside of us. That’s it for today’s "ThanksGIFing." I didn’t share as many GIFs as I had hoped, but I’m thankful for each one, and for what they represent. How ever you show thanks this week, I hope you do it from a place of sincerity and simplicity.

I was asked a couple of weeks ago by a teacher in my district about various ways to create math equations using software we had available to us in our district. Our teachers use a wide variety of tools, including NeoOffice, ExamView, and a host of other applications. Our Macs also include Grapher, we have access to Google Docs, and most of our teachers have Promethean Interactive Whiteboards. That means they also have access to the equation editor within ActivInspire, the software that many of our elementary and middle school teachers use to craft interactive lessons. In short, we have no shortage of ways in which math equations can be written. I wanted to make sure that I would have handy access to materials for tutorials, so I spent some time creating the following videos today. They aren’t my best screencasts, but at least they provide three quick ways to create math equations using software that is either freely available or accessible to those in our district. Please look passed my amateurish attempts to talk math operations Creating Equations with Grapher (Comes installed with all Macs)   Creating Equations with Google Docs (Free for all Google Accounts) Creating Equations with ActivInspire (Available to all Promethean Users)