Blingaz Tech Talk

  Case Study 101:   Ashanti, a 12-year-old African American girl is sitting in her 6th grade classroom.   She is tall and skinny like a string bean with a plaits on both sides of her head (a spit hair plan).   Oh yeah! She also sports a bang. Her grandma nicely comb pressed her hair for school.   She is a real girlie girl with her colored barrettes, painted nails, and fruity smelling lip gloss.   She does not wear the most expensive clothes, but her grandma sure grooms her well for school.   Here comes Mary, a big strapping bowlegged girl. There is rumor she already had a baby.   She shows up in class from a northern city—New York or someplace like that, from up the road, as Ashanti’s relatives would say.   She really looks older than Ashanti and the other girls in the class. She talks with a deep voice and she is not the best academic student.   She cheats off other people’s papers.   She probably got in trouble at her last school....

K-12 education is going through a transformation and we need reaffirmation from our students. We see their smiling (and sometime somber) faces on Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet.  They look like they understand what is going on, but do they really?  With more than half student populations (all in some places) on virtual learning, the bar just got raised for student learning and accountability is sky high.  From A Teacher's Point of View Teachers need student learning to be personalized and transparent.   Socrative  is a way for teachers to create exit tickets to get feedback on students’ understanding of concepts during that live online session.  The Student Response System populates responses from students for teachers to view from their screen in real time.  Beautifully transparent!  Teacher can see how students answer questions on a quiz, gives opportunities to assign group work and collaborative assessments, and accommodates thos...

At bedtime, I remember jumping on icy cold bed sheets and waiting patiently for my grandmother to bring me a, cozy, toasty, snuggly blanket that she warmed at the stove.   She would wrap me in it, and I would fall fast asleep.   But there was one thing missing—a bedtime story.   I wish she could have read to me a bedtime story when she wrapped me in the warmth of her love.     However, my grandmother only had a 6 th grade education, so I will never marvel in that childhood experience.   Oh, how I longed to be a librocubicularist! This dream was just an image in my mind because I did not have good reading skill nor books to fall asleep with a book.   However, I made it through high school and into college.   Though, I took remedial English my freshman year.   Then, when I took the Education Entrance Exam (EEE), I passed the writing and math portions, but failed the reading part. The college required that I had to take remedial reading in th...

  What is the Gooseneck?   When I started teaching in the mid-1990s, I courageously used the overhead projector because my little first graders needed so much modeling.   They would be so engaged as I dimmed the lights and projected images form transparencies that I created or photocopied to project on a screen, and sometimes the wall.   That was awesome!   Until around 2010, Pamela met Elmo, thus the “Pam-Elmo” love connection was born.   Our first encounter was a bit odd, but the with only the need for a brief introduction to a goose neck piece of equipment known as a document camera, quickly engaged the most unmotivated and troubled teens in South Carolina who were serving sentences as youth offenders.   This digital age inspired technology hardware to enhance effective teaching practices with equipment such as the Elmo TT-12F document camera/presenter.   We did not always have enough books or instructional materials for all the students. ...