Semester Wrap up

Subject	Tuesday TIC Tip
From	CJ Mcdonald
To	EX All; ORALL
Sent	Tuesday, December 16, 2014 5:43 AM



Colleagues,
                Two whole weeks!  From talking to some of you, it may be busier than during a work week for some of you!  I’ll not pile anymore information onto your “TIC” pile.  I challenge you to go through a few of my old emails and just check out and play with some of the things.  Literally play around with them: I always make a video of my daughter to play with video tools to see if I like it or not.


Some successes from the semester:
1. We made it through the printer/wifi/PC chaos at the beginning of the year!
2. Nearly everybody has been synced to OneDrive and thus has their files backed up!
3. Kahoot was particularly popular with the staff and students as a formative assessment
4. The District Technology Committee has been working on K12 Technology standards to guide instructional decisions in regards to student technology use
5. Seriously: the hottest new mobile game for students is called Trivia Crack.  Its trivial pursuit.  Seriously that’s their favorite (nothing about tying ropes, or juicing candies or call of auto theft….).  I’d say try it over the break but you won’t get anything else done.  They aptly used the word “crack” in the title…


Goals for 2nd semester successes:
1. I would like to meet with teams in addition to individuals for technology instruction (so I can cover more ground)
2. I would like to document that teachers are proficient in:
1. Google Drive
2. OneDrive
3. Office Products
3. I would like to see a marked improvement in communication with parents and students.  I will continually encourage people to use at least one of these:
1. Websites
2. Blogs
4. Teach surveys as a form of digital turning in
1. Sharing is laboursome, even in Google where it actually works
2. Creating a survey for kids to enter a url of their work will make your life MUCH easier.




Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!  I will have my email “on”, so go ahead and let me know if you have any questions!  I’ll get to them at some point.


CJ McDonald
Linn-Mar Community School District
Middle School Technology Integration Coach
(319) 892-4856
LM TICs Website: http://ow.ly/AxFhK

Syncing Data, Google Form Making

Subject	Tuesday Tic Tip
From	CJ Mcdonald
To	EX All; ORALL
Sent	Tuesday, December 09, 2014 6:15 AM



Morning all,
                I hope everything is going well—late Thanksgivings really make the pre-Christmas time fly by!  Since this email is about data, I thought I’d post one of my favorites:



--- yes I know I’m a dork—I’ve accepted that long ago.   


Below is the overall data I have for the OneDrive syncing I’ve done.  We are almost done!  I’ve had a lot of great conversations about where and how to save documents! (HERE is the video I made a couple weeks ago about OneDrive syncing in case you missed it last time)





The way I did the chart above is creating a form (survey) that I fill out after I speak with each one of you.  Then I have created a pivot table and a pivot chart to visualize my data.
HERE is how to make a Google form (first 8 slides).
HERE is a video I found on making a Google sheets pivot table.
I’m learning a little more about these each time I help someone with this, so if you have data or information you’d like to visualize in some way, please set up a meeting with me to help you! 


Workshops:
• Syncing OneDrive
• Using Google Sheets & Excel to visualize data


Oak Ridge (Computers Classroom)
• Wed. 7:15-7:45 AM
• Thursday 3:00-3:30 PM


Excelsior
• Tuesday 3:00-3:30 (early this week!  Sorry that’s just what I have to do to make it happen!)
• Thursday 7:15-7:45 AM


Go out and dominate today!


CJ McDonald
Linn-Mar Community School District
Middle School Technology Integration Coach
(319) 892-4856
LM TICs Website: http://ow.ly/AxFhK

Personal Learning Networks (social media and education)

Subject	Tuesday Tic Tip
From	CJ Mcdonald
To	ORALL; EX All
Sent	Tuesday, December 02, 2014 6:15 AM



Colleagues,
                Hope you all had a great break!  Christmas will come quickly this year with such a late Thanksgiving.  I have been working with a lot of individuals.  The next couple years we will be continuing to transform the culture of the school to be more collaborative…it will be more in the vein of that culture shift to begin meeting with your teams (and more efficient).  If there is a project that needs tweaking or even discussed, I’d love to come meet during your Team Time.  Keep that in mind!  Please don’t interpret that as me not being happy to meet with you individually, I would just like to meet with teams when possible.


Over the next week or two so I hope to accomplish my goal of syncing everybody’s hard drive and have a file storage strategy discussion with them! 


With some “free time” coming up (Winter break), I thought that people would like to get a little learning or entertainment in… So.  On to Twitter:
A lot of what I have learned about education and technology has come from my PLN (Personal Learning Network).  This is a series of blogs and twitter feeds that I follow.  I often read about ideas other educators have and up to date research on the go as I am doing something else.  These resources are always there for me and can fill as little as a couple minutes or can dive into a couple of hours of interest.  I highly suggest that teachers develop their own PLN.


To do this, I suggest:
• Setting up a twitter account—one where you are able to express your opinions, and not to have a bunch of kids “follow you”.
• If you are interested but intimidated, let me know I can walk you through this!!
• Find a lot of ideas on who to “follow” (get their tweets) HERE
• Or you can find someone you trust and look at who they follow…that’s what I did.
• Go ahead and follow @lionleaders, or if you don’t get annoyed with a mix of educational and non-education tweets; @cjmcdonald61581
• You can find lots of times were people gather and discuss specific topics HERE. 
• As you find blogs you like, bookmark them to visit them periodically—many people tweet a link to their blog posts, so  you may have access to many small blogs through twitter.
• Heck, go ahead and create a professional blog of your own!  Even if nobody reads the thing is still good documentation or reflection tool (remember, reflection is how EVERYONE learns…)
• Its pretty easy.  HERE are the instructions for that.


Workshops for this week:
Topic: Personal Learning Network set up and exploration
Oak Ridge (Computers Lab)
• Friday 7:15-7:45
• Friday 3:00-3:30


Excelsior
• Wed. 3:00-3:30
• Thursday 3-3:30


CJ McDonald
Linn-Mar Community School District
Middle School Technology Integration Coach
(319) 892-4856
LM TICs Website: http://ow.ly/AxFhK