🎸 Rockstar Recognition

Position: K-12 TL/tech/ms CS teacher/HS LEAD teacher

District: Osage Community Schools

Years Served: 23 years

Favorite Tech Moment: When I see students "get it" they get so excited!

Word of Wisdom: "We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies that haven't been invented, in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet".

- Richard Riley

💻 Tech Tool of the Month

Quizizz AI = Gamechanger

If you are like me, you are constantly trying to improve your instruction and materials to increase students' mastery of skills. I have done this for years, with mixed results. Recently I researched how I can improve the quality of the questions I ask students. This is when I started to use Quizizz and have found it to be a gamechanger in how I create my assessments with amazing results. 

Quizizz AI is able to take my tests, worksheets, slideshows, and even YouTube videos, and turn them into quality, engaging assessments, which requires very little work and saves me so much time. AI also provides another option of how to phrase or ask a question so it can be more relatable to students by making them into story problems or personalizing the questions. Quizizz has a massive library of quizzes that you can borrow, grab, edit, or just roll out to your classes in minutes.

Assessments can be serious or fun with things like scoreboards, powerups, and Q-Bits (Avataurs) to motivate and keep students engaged. What’s more, the new Accommodation Profiles features have made it so simple to choose students from your roster and quickly translate, add time, reduce choices, and provide read-alouds to easily meet all students’ needs. Quizizz has 17 ways to ask questions including hotspot, reorder, drag/drop, categorize and more. Quizizz is constantly adding and improving their platform meaning I keep getting new ideas and ways to improve my assessments, while saving me valuable time that I can give back to my students.

Huge shout out to Christopher Stotz for sharing this month's Tech Tool. He is from Ankeny Community Schools, has been in education for 17 years and currently serves as an Industrial Tech Instructor and Tech Integrationist.

Have an idea to share? Check out the Community Content Section below!

Learning Recommendation

Hacking Leadership by Joe Sanfelippo and Tony Sinanis

Would you want to work for you? Would you enjoy being a teacher or a student at your school? Do you enter the building with a smile on your face, anticipating a day of inspiration, excitement , and joy? Is there any hesitation in your answers? 

Hacking Leadership is the fifth book in the Hack Learning Series. The authors are all education hackers; that is, they strive to solve problems with right-now solutions that don't require a five-year plan.

Inside the Book:

• The Problem: Something educators are currently wrestling with that doesn't yet have a clear-cut solution.
• The Hack: A brief description of the author's unique solution.
• What You Can Do Tomorrow: Ways you can take the basic hack and implement it right away in bare-bones form.
• Blueprint for Full Implementation: A step-by-step system for building long-term capacity
• Overcoming Pushback: A list of possible objections you might come up against in your attempt to implement this hack and how to overcome them.
• The Hack in Action: A snapshot of an educator or group of educators who have this hack in their work and how they did it.

"Because a school's culture extends to all of its stakeholders, effective interactions are the single most important non-negotiable in creating flourishing schools"