Blingaz Tech Talk

I started teaching in elementary school in the mid-1990s when basic computing was all that I knew.   My school had a Title I computer lab where students engaged in computer-assisted instruction in a weekly rotation with art, music, physical education, and library.   I never knew what they were learning in the computer lab.   I never asked the proctor assigned to the lab and did not know how to connect the computer assisted instruction with my classroom instruction.   I had a successful first three (and only) years as an elementary school teacher, but it was hard.   My students had very low skills and most of them were not ready for first grade (even though most of them attended kindergarten).   During that time, the focus of kindergarten was play and then the next academic year was a major culture shock to desks and no sleep time!     I was always brainstorming, always searching, always networking, always looking for new ways to enhance my instruc...

Metaverse  is the #1 tool for creating augmented reality (AR) and interactive content without using any code, and it does not require a headset (Young, 2020).  This Augmented Reality stimulates and  encourages learners to get engaged, empowered and captured in learning experiences that have endless possibilities.  This is a small price for our digital natives to move beyond the simple and into a more advanced and stimulating segments in our virtual world (Massis, 2015).  As we have seen, 2020 is the year of unleased possibilities, they no longer offer customer support as of November 15, 2020.       It is awesome for young learners (and adults too!) and will not break the bank because it is absolutely free!    The sign up is super easy for anyone who is ready to create content with unlimited potential.    The tool can be used for creating anything you can possibly think of in your imagination.    You can...

  As I think about makerspaces, I reminisce about my childhood.  My cousin had gotten a one-cassette radio for her birthday from her dad and her mom got her a pack of cassette tapes.  She and I wrote the lyrics to popular songs and then we would record ourselves singing the songs.  We would play back our recordings and record over them until we heard it the way we thought it should be. I remember we popped a few cassette tape ribbons, but we figured out that a little piece of invisible tape mended the tape ribbon and it ran over the reel just fine.  This was our own made up preservation effort that worked time and time again.  An ode to the Thomas Makerspace!       We did not know how to use the fast-forward and the rewind functions until we tried them out.  Once we did, we auditioned to became superstars!  We critiqued each other’s renditions from our own star-studded rubric.  As Moorefield-Lang (2014) argued, we were eng...