The Soulful Nature of Change

If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow – John Dewey   Over the past month, I have weeded (discarded) approximately 4,000 outdated, older books from our library’s collection as part of current renovation efforts to create an updated, modernized, technology-rich environment for our students at...

Reflections of an Ish-ful Educator

Cathy Collins In Peter Reynold’s book, “Ish,” a creative spirit learns that thinking “ish-ly” is far more important than “getting it right.” Hearing Reynolds reinforce that important message in his Ted-ish talk at this year’s MassCUE Conference caused me to reflect on my own path toward becoming an “Ish-ful” educator....

The Power of One

“I learned that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out. That as long as it exists within us we cannot be destroyed.” ― Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One When I was younger I read the book The Power...

Tales of a Tech Gypsy – Design Thinking Through Technology

This year’s ACTEM Conference in Augusta, Maine, “Rebooted and Reimagined,” included many excellent sessions on a wide range of informative technology topics, but the session that I found by far to be the most interesting was Dan Ryder’s “Design Thinking Through Technology” workshop. Dan is a super cool human being...

Opening Doors & Hallways

I was asked recently to pull together thoughts as to why I am so passionate about studying technology. I am a digital native, though at my age someone might confuse me for a digital immigrant. I learned math facts playing Math Blaster on my IBM computer (which was a HUGE box)....

Are Your Students Research Ready?

Our students need to be ready to find, evaluate, manage, and use information in a whole new way. The avalanche of information and misinformation in a simple Google search on any given topic is overwhelming to all researchers. According to SINTEF, 90% of the world’s data (good or bad) has...

Featured Speaker Dr. Reshan Richards

Next month, I have the honor of being a ‘Featured Speaker’ at the 2014 MassCUE/M.A.S.S. Tech conference. I’ll be doing one session each day. My session on Tuesday is titled Leading Online: Leading the Learning, Leading by Learning. Following a similar format to other presentations my co-author, Steve Valentine, and...

New School Year!

A new school year is filled with excitement, a fresh start, new outfits, school supplies, and new experiences. Teachers have high hopes that their students will enter with a thirst to learn and teachers desire to quench that thirst through their instruction. However, teaching isn’t as much about the content...

Through the Eyes of a Child- A New Lens

I remember sitting in my elementary school listening to what my classmates wanted to be when they grew up. Popular choices were an astronaut, a sports player, a nurse, doctor, or teacher. Did you ever hear an eight year old say, “When I grow up I want to be a...

Tales of a Tech Gypsy – Slippery Slopes

“Educational change is not constrained by lack of technology but a lack of sociological imagination.” Diana Rhoten As a new school year begins, and our high school library undergoes a radical transformation in which outdated books are stripped from shelves and digital workstations are added, I find myself pausing to...

Tales of a Tech Gypsy – AASL Intellectual Freedom Award

This is my first blog post in “OnCUE,” and I’m happy to begin this process of sharing ideas about all things tech, library and education-related, on behalf of MassCUE. On this 24th of June and first day of summer vacation for the Sharon district, I have been frantically scrambling to...

Providing a MassCUE Online Course

MassCUE offered me the opportunity this past winter to offer an online professional development course through their site. Although I had offered online and asynchronous courses before through Moodle, this proposal involved learning and utilizing the Edmodo interface to build and deliver the course. Additionally, through this experience I was...

Making Connections

I was fortunate to be able to be part of two exciting conferences this past month: ISTE 2014 in Atlanta and BLC 2014 in Boston. If you have never been to ISTE, the only thing I can say is ISTE seems to be on steroids, compared to the MassCUE/M.A.S.S. fall...

ISTE2014

The annual ISTE conference is always packed full of sessions, meetings with vendors on the exhibit floor, networking, crowds, and, almost always, heat and humidity. This year’s conference in Atlanta had plenty of all of the above and surpassed expectations in several categories, including humidity. I always have my own...