Mr I's Digital Domain

 If I have a "Bible" of teaching, it's Greta Nagel's The Tao of Teaching. I have a well-thumbed copy with underlining, arrows, and margin notes. Every year I come back to it, dipping into it every so often for inspiration. If you haven't read it, this is Nagel's application of the Tao Te Ching to teaching, and she spotlights three teachers and their classrooms to illustrate various maxims. The chapters are only a few pages each and, like the Tao itself, are not linear, so you can open the book to any page and drink deeply. But here's the cool thing. I wrote a fan letter to Ms Nagel and actually got a response. Read on for more.

My first unconference but definitely not my last! I presented one and a half times on Lego robotics (the half being a shared preso with Peter Randall of Chestnut Hill Academy, who talked about the upper school robotics experience). But the extremely cool thing was that if felt very much like the conference equivalent of open source software: collaborative, creative, helpful, and slightly subversive.

My very first unconference! Sounds like fun. And I'm one of the "featured edcampers" on their website.

I'm introduced as a "Lego Robotics Master", which is kind of funny, because I'm anything but. Is it like being a Jedi Master? Because I would really like that. However, I think I'll take some Lego kits and see if anyone's interested in attending a workshop on robotics. Then we can all sit on the floor and play with Legos. Woohoo! See you May 22 at Drexel.

So we're doing Ignite presentations, slightly modified. An Ignite preso is 5 minutes, 20 slides, all slides auto-advance in 15 seconds. I changed it to 2 minutes for my 7th-graders. They're doing topics about imperialism, colonialism, and the leadup to WWI. Should be fun!

 Actually, I'm the dummy. And today is my first attempt at using a Moodle quiz. There are plenty of good videos on YouTube on how to make quizzes, and lots of documentation over at moodle.org. Just drop in there and do a search. I was inspired by a webinar I attended yesterday on Moodle and Efficiency put on by the PA Dept of Ed. It so happened that my 7th grade history class is having a quiz today, so last night I made up the quiz in Moodle.