You are cordially invited to attend a Promethean Lunch & Learn at ESC-20 this coming Wednesday, April 27 from 11:45 AM to 12:45 PM (this will take place after Curriculum Forum so time may vary by a few minutes). The topic will be Four Strategies to Get Kids Thinking (based on Marzano's Effective Strategies for Teaching and Learning). Bring a smartphone or other mobile device, join us for lunch, pretend you were the student in a digital classroom, and have fun! Registration is free but required at http://tinyurl.com/PrometheanLunchLearnEverything posted on Miguel Guhlin's blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

While lesson plans may have fallen out of favor in some districts, replaced by online curriculum management systems, the lesson planning process still represents an excellent opportunity for collaborative planning and development. When the opportunity presents itself for co-planning, it’s important to have a common framework for lessons that enlists the expertise of classroom teachers and campus curriculum guides. One popular approach to lesson planning is the 5E Model (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate). Let’s explore 5E and how it might look when enhanced with technology.Read the rest of this blog entry online at www.tcea.org/blogEverything posted on Miguel Guhlin's blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

In this balanced piece on ePortfolio solutions, Google or Microsoft, I explore my biases :Read the complete entry online at TCEA TechNotes Blog!Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin's blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

While digging through an app on my phone, I ran across a paragraph that prompted a few questions worth pondering, no matter what role you are called to serve in an organization. And, drafting those questions immediately made me think of the term, servant leadership.If you're not familiar with servant leadership, here's a quick review:"The servant-leader is servant first... It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions...The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types.The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?" (Source)When you walk into new position, you have to ask yourself, are you willing to serve? Here's another way of looking at the servant-leader:He is willing to do the unpopular jobs, the jobs he might think are beneath him, the jobs that no-one else sees, that are left when everyone else has gone home. That is leadership, whether you are labeled a leader or not. (Source: BibleGateway app)Here's an idea. Make an online form--Google Form or Excel Online--and have your team respond to the questions...then see how they differ from each other.What are the unpopular jobs in your organization?What are the jobs others think are beneath them?What are the jobs that need doing that no one wants to do?How do you seek out new jobs like the ones alluded to in the preceding questions?What do you think? Worth doing?Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin's blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

"How can I make my webinars, which are usually 30 to 60 minutes long, more interactive?" I asked myself after being a talking head in my last webinar. Facilitating webinars at TCEA on a regular basis, I definitely want to know better approaches for engaging the audience, enabling them to move from being just listeners to active participants. With that imperative motivating me, I stopped for a moment and asked some colleagues, "How do you make your webinars more interactive?"Read the complete blog entry online at TCEA TechNotes.Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin's blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

"When do you find time to blog?" Yes, the question frequently comes up. Often, I blog in the wee hours of the morning, in the evenings, or binge-blog during the weekend and schedule postings during the week (delayed gratification and all that). These days, though, I blog during the day, at work. Would you believe I wrote 4-5 blog entries just yesterday? I'm almost back to my early blogging years output (7-8 per day)! What fun! I'm grateful that my colleagues have noticed.Photo Credit: Peggy Reimers (@preimers)Normally, I'd be wearing a suit and tie but today was casual dress.The Kick-It Award comes with high praise from my esteemed colleagues at the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA). As the first recipient of the Kick-It Award (eat your heart out, Chuck N), I earn the award for...yes, doing what I love, writing, which in today's parlance is, blogging.Update: You may want to read this blog entry offering Five Ways for Leaders to Say "Well-Done!"The award means a lot, not just because it was home-made by Dr. Bruce Ellis (although that does speak to his puissant skills as a "TCEA Maker") but rather because recognition from your work colleagues is always esteemed.Thank you for making me feel welcome and for letting me do what I love. In the meantime, why don't you check out some of my TCEA blog entries? Tweet, RT, and Facebook them...not for money, but to ensure all read the gospel of edtech.Read Miguel's TCEA TechNotes blog entries(lots of other great stuff there by my colleagues!)Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin's blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Since I'm now contributing to a Wordpress blog on a regular basis, one of the annoying aspects of Wordpress includes a terrible way of handling links, as shown in the picture below. It takes 3 clicks to get things done.As a result, I've started looking for an alternative blog entry composer, another way of writing and submitting to Wordpress.notice I typed the link in the box...but you can see that it just made a search out of it, and I have to click on the "open link in a new tab" box. What a pain!One of the solutions I stumbled upon, almost immediately, is the Open Live Writer, a Windows program for the new Windows 10 machine that I'm carrying around these days (OneNote IS the killer app).Open Live Writer looks like a free open source version of Windows Live Writer (which you can still get but hasn't kept up with the times), and works surprisingly well (Microsoft and Windows are surprising almost every day with how wonderful they are).As you can see from the image above, one of Open Live Writer advantages over Windows Live Writer is that it supports Wordpress and Google's Blogger (my favorite blogging tool!).  The former has worked quite well.Mac user? https://www.getblogo.com/Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin's blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

In their moving tribute to rigor and relevance, esteemed colleagues Eric Scheninger and Weston Kieschnick ask, "Are we using technology in our classroom merely to say we’re using technology in our classroom? Or are we using it to advance learning goals and arm our students with technology skills necessary to thrive in the 21st century?" These are definitely worthwhile questions. I’m just not sure that rigor, relevance have anything to do with arming our children with technology skills to thrive in the present century.   In their EdTech Magazine blog entry they push back against the "slapdash technology use" that plagues many schools, putting out a call for "strategic implementation." The problem is, they decide to use rigor and relevance as their tool. Why rigor and relevance? Weston and Eric state that the Rigor and Relevance Framework is… …a robust tool that guides, vets, monitors and personalizes technology implementation, provides a better alternative. It is a simple, dynamic tool to examine curriculum, instruction and assessment…using two dimensions — critical thinking (rigor) and application (relevance)…. You know, this reminds me of my exploration of rigor and relevance years ago…and effort in arranging words on a chart that make for talking points but little else of value, certainly not "strategic implementation. Let’s take a quick trip down Memory Lane…   or… Source: Blending Rigor and Relevance with SAMR, and Partnership for 21st Century Skills   At this point, however, I’m not convinced (what, you missed that?!?) that quadrant learning is anything more than just another way of framing the conversation. And while framing the conversation may be valuable for pundits, it doesn’t get to the real goal of strategic implementation. The question that needs to be asked is, What IS strategic implementation? Here is one possible definition: Strategic implementation is critical to…success, addressing the who, where, when, and how of reaching the desired goals and objectives. It focuses on the entire organization. Implementation occurs after environmental scans, SWOT analyses, and identifying strategic issues and goals. Source Notice that strategic implementation gets to the nitty-gritty of implementation. In fact, for a strategy to be successful, Scott Edinger suggests the 3Cs—Clarify, Communicate, and Cascade. It is the last that is the toughest in schools (if not everywhere). Here’s what cascade means: …if you want your strategy implemented well, you need to cascade it throughout the organization and get to the practical and tactical components of people’s jobs every day. Let’s read that again--The practical and tactical components of people’s jobs every day. How does Eric and Weston’s use of Rigor and Relevance accomplish that? As Edinger says in his piece, strategy plays well with the leadership, but it’s the practical/tactical details that must carry the day, day in and day out. Make no mistake—strategic implementation can’t be done from behind the keynote speaker’s podium, anymore than feeding the hungry can be done behind the pulpit. If you want strategic implementation, you’ll have to step out there and get it done…one person at a time, one life at a time, one device, one learner at a time.

If you’re like me, your phone may be the best camera you have. In this blog entry, we’ll quickly explore some tools and the special effects that are possible on your device...Creating and sharing fabulous photos may best be achieved by following a simple three-step process. Step 1 - Take Fabulous Photos Step 2 - Explore Great iPhoneography ExamplesStep 3 - Edit and Share Your PhotosRead the rest of this blog entry, and you may enjoy visiting this treasure trove!Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin's blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

THowdy! The following blog entry first appeared online at TCEA TechNotes Blog.Read the rest of Five Ways to a Onetastic Learning Experience at TCEA TechNotes Blog!Over the last two months, I have been amazed at how easily I have transitioned from other digital organizers to OneNote. Having migrated approximately 10,000 notes from Evernote  to various organizers, including Apple Notes, Centrallo, Evernote,Google Keep, MammothHQ, and SimpleNote, each of which have their own advantages and disadvantages (view comparison chart), OneNote surprised me.Join the ongoing TCEA Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) SkypeChat via Your Mobile Device or Online! Explore and share concepts at the intersection of teaching, learning, leading and technology!OneNote serves as a fantastic tool for personal organization and class management. For example, it has the following admirable features:OneNote Notebooks can be easily accessed on a wide variety of devices (e.g. iOS, Android, Windows); you do not need a Windows computer to take advantage of the basic features, which are considerable and available at no-cost.Notebooks, each with its own sections that can be password protected or locked with SDES/AES encryption, contain pages that can be created and shared via OneNote Online with anyone.Email content to your OneNote Notebook (via me@onenote.com) and save it in a section of your default notebook (set that up in the settings) by including @section_name in the email Subject:.As a sharing tool, it wins hands-down for classroom deployment. Why? As a teacher, I can create materials and share them via a resource notebook for students that they can access on their mobile device. With a Windows computer, I can create Class Notebooks that allow for a collaborative common area, a content library where I can distribute updated documents to each student individually en masse, a real time-saving feature.OneNote’s content and formatting tools boast a GUI interface that is difficult to match, yet relatively uncluttered.But wait! There’s ONE MORE feature that I have just become aware of. OneNote can be enhanced by add-ons to expand its functionality on Microsoft Windows. If you have OneNote 2013 (or 2016), you can easily install Onetastic, a free multi-purpose add-on for Microsoft OneNote reminiscent of the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox. Onetastic enables the use of custom macros such as the following:Create a table of contents for a notebook, a section, or a page using the Table of Contents macros.Use the Search and Replace macro to quickly make adjustments across multiple notebooks or a single notebook, including HTML replacement.Add Excel-like functions to tables (yes, OneNote has working tables!) such as Sum, Average, Min, Max, Count Numbers, and more.Number all cells in a table, autofill, and other items.Insert monthly calendars into notes.Display a summary page of all recent changes in a notebook or section.And many more macros that provide enhanced functionality non-existent in other tools.If you haven’t used OneNote, you will want to start soon! It is a must have-organizer for classroom teachers and campus administrators. Here are five ways to create a "onetastic learning experience:"Using Microsoft Office Lens app on Android/iOS, "scan" documents and save them directly to OneNote.Using the OneNote clipper (e.g. Chrome add-on,Firefox, Edge ), remove web page clutter, then capture pages and content, saving them to the resource notebook you created for your students to use.Using Diigo Social Bookmarking tool, free for educators and their students, you and your class can bookmark resources to a Diigo Group. The RSS feed for that Diigo Group can then be fed throughIFTTT.com and resources auto-saved into the OneNote Notebook and Section of your choice, as the teacher. Be sure to read the tutorial here at TCEA!Create student ePortfolios by granting every student a section in a OneNote notebook (or Class Notebook, which provides even more flexibility) where they can save their work. Then, when they leave or graduate, export that section out so they can "take it with them." You can embed documents, pictures, and videos in the pages of that ePortfolio.Help students and staff keep notes by creating a page template such as Cornell Note-Taking or meeting notes for OneNote. Students and staff can "import" that into their OneNote 2016 program and then use it. Or, if only the teacher has OneNote 2016 and students are using OneNote Online, then the teacher can do it.If you aren’t using OneNote Online, OneNote 2016, and the Onetastic tool with all the great macros that come with it, then you are missing out!Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin's blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure