Deb Norton Tech

 🍂🍂 Happy November all! 🍂🍂 If you live in Wisconsin or the midwest I hope you are enjoying the fall-like weather and the cool temperatures. I feel as though we have finally gotten into a rhythm of day to day school, teaching and learning.  It's been a creative week of STEM projects in our Innovation Lab. During Excel this week my colleague, Teri and I, led a Cricut Design Space Activity to create a personalized name plate. Students were able to show understanding of scale, positioning, layers, welding and weeding, which are all graphic design concepts. Another project my youth apprentice and I worked on is a balsa wood airplane cut out on the Cricut machine. We wanted to add weight to the nose of the plane, so we used Tinkercad.com to design and then 3D print pieces to add to the nose.    It may seem like a simple project, but a lot of design, critical thinking and troubleshooting went into these gliders.   On Monday we plan to have a friendly comp...

🎃 👻 🦇 🕷️ Happy Friday everyone! I hope your week went well. It was dress up days for us for Halloween Spirit Week. I'm not sure who enjoys this more, the teachers or the students.  Here are a few things that have come my way this week: Top 5 Game-Based Learning Websites  posted by Meagan Kelly from "I  ♥  Edu".  I'm all in when it comes to using game-based learning in the classroom. I came across this video  I created to help a colleague on how to make a stop animation video using Google Slides. It's a pretty rough video, but still worth sharing. This reminded me of this  free webinar on making stop animation by Eric Curts.  I'm excited to begin offering STEM activities to our HS students along with my colleague, Teri, our media specialist. We're going to focus on using the Cricut cutting machine during the month of November. Encouraging students to explore STEM related activities and careers is very important to me. This week ...

Greetings fellow educators. How was your week? Here are a few links and loves I’ve been enjoying lately. With the help of my co-workers, YouTubers and several Facebook groups and Instagram posts , , I feel as though I finally have a general understanding of how to design and create with the Cricut Design Space platform and the Cricut machine in our Innovation Lab. Next week I am planning lessons for students in a media class, centered around the Design Thinking Model , to create a product with the Cricut machine. In yet another classroom, I am planning lessons for students using the popular Applied Digital Skills platform. These are video based lessons that integrate the Google for Education Suite (docs, slides, mail, maps, sites etc.) to have students work collaboratively to accomplish real life projects and skills. The one I am going to use is called Plan an Event . Do you enjoy being creative? Lately I’ve been really drawn to trying creative challenges. I’ve ...

Happy New Year Everyone! Image Credit Do you have any goals for the year 2019? Have you heard of #OneWord365 ? This movement has been around for a while now and the idea is to choose just one word to focus on every day all year long. This one word sums up who you want to be or how you want to live. My #OneWord365 is C r e a t i v i t y ! Recently I’ve take up a few creative projects. I have been learning brush lettering , which is a type of calligraphy.   I also have been learning how to use Instagram to its full potential as a way to share and connect with other techy people like this teacher does. I’m also determined to learn more about and become better at the Cricut machine. January is known for getting organized. Here are 10 ways to declutter your digital life in 10 minutes. I would like to tackle one of these each day for the first 10 days in January. Wish me luck. 🍀 Do you use Flippity.net ? There is an update . You can now create 5 diffe...