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Showing posts from July, 2024

Generate Instant Pear Decks

  I’ll keep this short as the video explains most of you. Any new educational technology can be complicated to dig into from scratch as you attempt to align it to learning outcomes.  Well, a new feature that Pear Deck has introduced has taken a giant leap forward to help educators do just that.  Before we jump into the new features, if you are unfamiliar with Pear Deck and why my students and I consider it the #1 EdTech tool that helps their learning, check out the video in the previous blog post.   But if you are more concerned with why you should even dive into Pear Deck or learn about this new AI generation of Pear Deck sessions to a learning target, check out the video below. Like I said, I’m keeping it short so you have time to watch the video. If you have questions, please contact me at mohammam@elmbrookschools.org or the Pear Deck Learning team at support@deck.peardeck.com . Also, check out the amazing Stacey Roshan's video on this update. 

I Was Experiencing Personalized Learning in 1987

I have been trying to catch up with episodes of George Couros’s excellent Innovator’s Mindset Podcast. Of course, I had to revisit the episode in which I was lucky to appear. While listening to it, I began to realize when I was talking about my favorite teachers. They were actually the ones who allowed me to experience personalized learning.  This is nearly 40 years ago! In 1997, the movie of the year was Beverly Hills Cop 2, and the biggest song of the year was “ Want to Dance with Somebody” by Whitney Houston.  Specifically, Mr. Vollrath, who I talked about in the episode, realized that it was not the ability to spell a word but to know what it means and use it in the proper context. As I write this post right now, I am still not the best speller, but there are tools that can assist me with it. I see red lines in Google Docs that alert me if I misspelled something. It’s like he understood the WHY of the words, which was not the spelling but the understanding of the words an...

Voice and Choice Are Not Just Buzzword

I believe that all learning is personal, and it still is. An essential part of ensuring that all learners' needs are being met is that they understand how they learn best and can communicate that to their teacher. Of course, this feedback means nothing if the instruction isn’t adjusted, but that’s another blog post in itself.  While going through some old photos on my MacBook, I came across this one 9 years ago when I began incorporating more voice and choice in my classroom. It illustrated a simple form of feedback I gained from students at the end of a unit. I’d have the headers on the board and leave the room while students wrote their opinions.  It’s hard to read, so I’ll put the responses in the table below. I did not correct any grammatical errors. How Have I Been Given Voice and Choice? We have a lot of apps to choose from, and we have the option to make presentations based on voice recording, visual demonstrations, or lab write-ups Projects allow us to be creative Mr. ...