The Friday Tech Tip

Happy Friday! I know you are asking yourself what are some stats about Youtube? A recent  study  from Emarkater states the following. . . "Roughly 1.58 billion individuals will watch YouTube at least once a month in 2018, representing two-thirds of digital video viewers. The share of digital video viewers watching the platform reaches nearly 90% if one excludes the population in China, where YouTube is blocked by the government."  Youtube is powerful.. Youtube is the 2nd most used site in the United State after Google.com.  How many of you reading this have figured out how to fix something or learn something  thanks to Youtube?  Last weekend my family went camping and I watched this video a few times before setting up our new tent. We were star gazing and my daughter asked me which stars were were and I said I had to "get up for a minute" and pulled this up (so much for being unplugged) and could do a better job pointing out constellations....

Happy Friday! This week I have had the chance to participate in some great Professional Learning about Computer Science. On Monday Will Dodd from GYSTC came to the Elementary school and led Professional Learning on robotics in the classroom. I was able to share what I know about letting students know how to code using the free resources on Code.org.  Also, I was able to learn about how A rtificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality are changing the way Professional Athletes train .  Bottom line, I believe that this is a skill that all students need to have knowledge about. There will be jobs that will be available for our students that do not even exist yet.  I'm the father of six year old twins and I sometimes have to take a minute for that to sync in. It just makes me sit back and think about how I need to teach and preach my two to be open to new things, be open to change, and apply the skills  and think creatively.  The world is wide open to innovators....

Happy Friday! Our Elbert Innovates class (Teachers who are going through the Google Level 1 Certification) this past week had a great discussion about how our students access information through searches. In my experience in my 7th grade  middle school  classroom a few years ago I would take my students to the computer lab to do research and  my Middle Schoolers often struggled with trying to filter through the amount of information a Google search would populate on their topic. For example, we would search "cells" and bring up a good zillion (I'm estimating here) links about cells.  Some would be ads, some would be blogs, the top search would be a wikipedia article. .. etc. .. I'm sure you may have experienced this as well. My students had the technical knowledge to search but often would get stuck on finding the pertinent information they needed for their topic. Google has created Search lesson lesson plans on how to teach our students to be better searc...