Deb Norton Tech

Happy Friday Folks! My goodness it has been a busy week. I’m writing this post at 4:30am on this Friday morning. Nothing like sharing at the last minute! Here are a few highlights from my week: Tomorrow, Saturday, January 19th, I will be presenting a FREE SimpleK12 Webinar on Google Arts and Culture . Have you ever used this platform? In the webinar I will be showing all of the features and uses for using Google Arts and Culture in any classroom. I would love it if you joined me. Sign up here . I listened to this podcast about Emotional Labor. This really connected a lot of dots for me.  It does take quite a bit of labor to lead well and to show up for others in a leadership position.   If you use Remind101 with your students, you might want to read this update about Remind no longer working with Verizon Customers. (thank you to my colleague, Val, for sharing this with me) As you may know, I’m totally immersed in all things Google and Go...

Yesterday was a challenging day for our school because of a situation that brought about an hour long hard lockdown. I'm so thankful for our teachers who showed amazing professionalism, support and consideration for our students and staff. #TogetherWeAreBetter This Saturday, I will be presenting a SimpleK12 Webinar on Mobile Makerspaces: Tinkering with STEAM . This webinar is free and I will be sharing many ways to involve students in STEAM activities that are moveable and mobile and are fairly easy to implement. I love sharing all of the innovative things we are working on and using. In other exciting news, I have been given the amazing opportunity to be an instructor for a course called Artificial Intelligence Explorations and Their Practical Use in Schools. This course is being offered through ISTE U and is a nation-wide initiative. This is an incredible opportunity for me as well as the inspiring educators that are taking this online course. It’s so amazing to learn...

Engage Students and Enhance Learning with Innovative Activities from Google Recently I presented a webinar on using some of Google's latest and greatest experiments and activities. I thought I would share this presentation through my blog incase anyone wants to explore some of these fabulous ideas. During the webinar, we explored a range of activities, including some that use your voice, actions, or drawings in games and storytelling. I also showed how teachers and students can learn about concepts such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and augmented reality in simple, creative ways. Use the activities in this slideshow to engage students and enhance learning with a variety of activities and experiments that can be used across curriculum. ENJOY!

This week has been INCREDIBLE!  We are so blessed! On my commute to work, I listened to this and this and this .  (Better PD, Modern Family and Flipping Science) #TryPod To celebrate #InternationalWomen’sDay, I viewed this slideshow of girls from around the world going to school. This site intrigues me.   Move over escape rooms or BreakoutEDU, check out Room Escape Maker ! I’m among some incredible educators for this Saturday’s, free SimpleK12, Google Training Webinars.    Happy Friday and consider this inspiring message that I created with this Chrome extension . -------------------------------------------------------------------- Curricular Connection Google Drawings I have heard this tool referred to as the Swiss army knife of the GSuite!   I recently showed a colleague how to add a Google Drawing to a Google Document by clicking on Insert and then Drawing. Google Drawing provides a blank...

February is here! This week I have been super busy with so many wonderful classroom experiences, projects and opportunities. On Saturday (tomorrow Feb 3rd) I am presenting a webinar called, Game-Based Learning with Google through SimpleK12 .  The webinar is free and you can register here .  You attend the webinar from the comfort of your home and only need a computer to join. We’re going to be starting a Podcast with Peers in our school to promote discussions about teaching, learning and pedagogy. The first podcast will be from Cult of Pedagogy. I’m super excited to share podcasts with others. Speaking of sharing, did you read my post “ When Teachers Share ”? Bubbl.us I was recently reminded of this concept creation site by a fellow educator. Bubbl.us is easy to use and is free. Students can create concept maps quickly and simply. Happy, happy Friday everyone!

This Saturday, February 11th, 2017, I will be hosting a webinar for SimpleK12 on Learning with Data. The webinar is free and you can sign up to register here .  In this webinar, I will share all different types of tools and sites for teaching and learning about data.  Here are a few of the resources I will be sharing in the webinar: 1.  Collecting Data - I've started compiling a list of sites that allow students and teachers to find and download data.  I'll be sharing the collection in the webinar.  It probably isn't too surprising that Google Trends is one of my favorite sites to find interesting data. Here is a graph I created using the Numbers program on my Mac after exporting data about Valentine's Day from Google Trends -- In the webinar, I will show several other sites that can be used to collect and compare data.  #2 - Graphing and Charting Tools-  It doesn't get much easier than this Easy Bar Graph site. Elementary stu...