Last week, I took an impromptu trip to Portland, ME. I’d just gotten a brand new job, with a lot more responsibilities, and I wanted to celebrate before the school year started. Friends and family recommended Portland as a city with great food and scenic walks—perfect for me. Sunday I drove…

I’m on vacation this week, so I spent a couple of days finishing up my Bob the Snowman book, which I began over Christmas break. Working on this book has been a blast. I typically head over to Panera for a late lunch. As I’m eating, I pull out my…

Howard Johnson is a friend and frequent commenter on my articles. His thinking and writing can be a little dense, but they’re always worth unpacking for their invaluable insights. Two weeks ago, Howard commented on my most recent article, writing: I want to switch gears when discussing assessment and rubrics…

Over the past two weeks, my students have been diving into their first book project: designing and creating a book (mixing drawings with text) about a made-up person or made-up land. Initially, I thought my first-graders would be the most enthusiastic about this particular book project. I felt the project…

It was a short week after Christmas break, but one of my kindergarten classes and all of my 1st- and 2nd-grade classes are preparing to use Book Creator for iPad. Once the cold dawn of reality hit me on Wednesday morning, I made the tactical decision to streamline my plans…

Last fall, I began a new job as a K-2 technology teacher. Besides teaching 400 students each week, I was also asked to develop a new technology curriculum. Because the existing technology class had grown out of an academic support class, students were mostly using educational iPad apps to practice…

A few weeks ago, I began thinking about wrapping up this blog series. Not because I was tired of writing it, but because I was running out of things to say. I started this series to document, in real time, the curriculum I was developing as a K-2 technology teacher…

All of my first-grade classes and half of my kindergarten classes are currently making animated flip books in Easy Studio. Going into the week, I wasn’t sure how the kindergarteners would handle the transition, but they did really well. I’d estimate that over 75% of the kindergarteners were able to…

This week, most of my first-grade classes (and one of my kindergarten classes) started making animated flip books in Easy Studio. I showed them how to use the “chain” tool to link shapes together last week, and I showed them how to use the camera tool to add pages to…