Friday, January 28, 2022

A Blended Learning Rally Cry

Let's go! 


To prepare our students to be successful in the future, to be able to thrive, lead, and achieve their potential, then learning with technology is paramount. Technology is ubiquitous, an integral part of everything that we do, see, touch, feel. Harnessing the power of technology is the task at hand for our future-ready students.

We are preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist. There are two fundamental skills that will benefit students regardless of career path: solving problems and working with others. Equipping students with these skills is our task at hand. Today’s technology truly broadens the possibilities of solving personal and world problems and allows for engaging with an authentic audience. Blended learning allows us to personalize and take ownership of learning and springboard us into greater depths of learning than we have ever had before. Each student must personally be able to connect to the information available through fast, reliable, and secure devices. They should be able to create, research, and share what they learn with others through these digital tools. The teacher should seek ways to best implement a differentiated approach to better personalize the learning for each student. 


We need willing students. We need passionate teachers. We need a powerful software. We need versatile tools. We need collaborative leaders.


- Brad Moser 2022



Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Thursday, April 22, 2021

Learning is Reflective


Today, I listened and learned from George Couros again. Honestly, I was entering this keynote thinking, I've heard from him before, does he have new insights to offer. The answer is interesting. 

Though much of what Geroge shared was similar to things I've heard from him before, I was impressed at how it hit me in new ways. Not that he didn't have new fresh content to share, he totally did since I have not heard him speak to reflective practice. However, every day we are new creatures. We have experiences yesterday that might make a passage we understood last week, present new ideas this week. 

So learning every day is important and vital for us to review what we learn and then reflect upon what we learn. 

Blogging allows us to deepen the learning, work through the process which in turn develops a deeper sense of understanding, empathy, and awareness.


Sunday, February 28, 2021

Highlights from Teacher Tips

Image of Brad

Over the past couple of years I have posted thoughts and insights to help teachers rock what they do. I tagged these on Twitter with the #TeacherTips. Here is a couple I'd like to highlight on my blog:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enjoy!

Sunday, June 25, 2017

Google TakeOut Hack....Transfer Ownership of all files

For a long time I have sat on a Google Hack that I think changed my life. I have wanted to share it with others and have done so by word of mouth, until today. I hope to share it with others and that is where this post begins. I am in love with Google and I have been since the beginning...seriously 11/20/2008 (Gmail was beta 2007). However, there is one huge area of Google that needs some improvement, TRANSFERRING OWNERSHIP of DRIVE FILES between Google Apps Accounts

Now this process is fairly straight forward. You open a Google Doc, you click to share it with another user, you change their permission to IS OWNER and away you go. However, if you are working for an institution of company that uses Google Apps for Education or Business and end up changes jobs, then you will want to transfer all those files. The process quickly becomes annoying. And to make matters worse you cannot transfer ownership from one Google Apps Domain to another. Meaning if you work for company ABC with an email name@ABC.com and then change jobs to company XYZ, you can not transfer those files to name@XYZ.com and make your new account the owner. You may share them but how long will your old company leave your old account open?

So, Google created Google TakeOut to help with this matter (Instructions here). Simply open TakeOut with your account you are leaving, choose the necessary files and data, click TakeOut and viola. You have a nice zip file of all your data. However, the files in your Google Drive are no longer Google Doc versions but their converted sometimes distorted parallel counterpart, Word & PowerPoint. This may sound good, but if you have ever used the conversion you know it sometimes can not be pretty. 

Until I discovered this Google Drive File Transfer trick I had put up with either sharing old files from my old school district to a personal Google account or trying to download those files and convert them to word and take up tons of space on my computer. 

Here is the solution for Google Drive File Transfer Trick (GDFTT for short): This is not for the weary Google Drive users. 

I will reference using a MacBook, but the same process will work with a PC. And describe the simplest method for this to work. This works going from one domain to any other domain. 

For this example, lets say we are leaving old@ABC.com and transferring to new@XYZ.org

Step 1: Open https://drive.google.com, sign into your old@ABC.com

Step 2: Create a new Folder for all the files you want to transfer and give it any name.

Step 3: Move all the files into this new folder

Step 4: Share the folder to your new@XYZ.org account. Sign into new@XYZ.org account and make sure the shared folder is added to your My Drive. 

Step 5: Download Google Drive App for you MacBook or PC

Step 6: Open and Sign into Google Drive App with your new account (new@XYZ.org) on your computer. I only choose to sync the one file that I am sharing. Note that any file located in My Drive that is not in a folder will always sync. Don't worry about these files unless you want them, then move them into the created shared Folder. 

Step 7: Let the shared folder is sync to your computer

Step 8: Right click and duplicate or make a copy using Finder or Windows on your computer.

Step 9: Let this copied folder sync with Google. Complete

You now have a new copied folder that contains all the files, in their original format, with new ownership rights. You also, have removed all share settings and will want to update any links inside documents to the new files. This process can take time. But at least you have a copy of all the docs and work those changes over time as needed. It is worth being able to have all the files downloaded and transfer of ownership. 

Monday, October 10, 2016

Launching our learning into the future

A conference keynote is like a coin flip, they can be compelling or boring and miss the mark. We had an awkward opening to the MOREnet2016 conference, however, like 80's slow claps, it slowly evolved to a remarkable and thought provoking message shared by John Spencer. I love to gather with my fellow educators and tech leaders in Missouri. MOREnet provides a lot of the backbone internet for various MO schools. They, along with COSN, help to host an annual edtech conference. It's their 25th year! 

I had a blast-off experience listening to John Spencer about his use of design thinking and learning applied to the classroom. You have to check out his messages. He runs a simple YouTube channel with great design-thinking messages. These messages apply across all subjects and grades. 

Design thinking helps students apply the learning of school to real projects. Check out more from John Spencer about Creativity: 



Check out his website: http://www.spencerauthor.com/

Here are a few thoughts inspired by John:


  • "When you don't share your voice with the world you rob the world of your creativity" - John Spencer
  • LAUNCH
  • Listen,learn
  • Ask questions
  • Understand ideas
    • P-product ideas
    • A-audience
    • R-Role develop your own
    • T-tasks, todo list and deadlines
    • S-Solution
  • Creating a prototype
  • Highlight and fix; embrace failure
  • Ready to launch
  • Why do we make stuff if it's just going to get destroyed.