Coding with your kids: a guide for parents.

When we think about all the things that we recognize as “essentials” to our children’s learning, the list can get really long very quickly. Recently, several high-profile individuals are advocating to add another thing to that list, coding. Why? Coding is the set of skills and concepts used to modify or create software on a…

Grade 1 Students Start Blogging with Easy Blogger Jr

At UWCSEA we like to empower our students to share their learning in lots of different ways. They take charge at Student-Led Conferences, and interact with various service groups as part of the school year. In Grade 1, we wanted to add blogging to an authentic audience to the list, both as a part of…

Letting Go of the Step by Step Tech Lesson

I admit it. I have a problem. It’s not a bad problem to have. But sometimes it can be depressing. Sometimes my problem makes me feel like I wasn’t a good teacher that day. Or that I didn’t make a difference for a student when I was in their class. What is my problem you…

Commenting in Google Docs just got better

Many teachers and students are using Google docs collaboratively. They allow us to highlight passages of writing and leave text comments in the margins which can be responded to and eventually, marked as resolved. These text-based conversations are great, but students and teachers may prefer to leave audio comments. Audio commenting was possible before but…

Email, Spam, YouTube Subscriptions and Snopes

One of the many wonderful things about having Google Apps at our school is that our students are able to have GMail accounts. This really does enable them to have the functionality we adults enjoy with having an email, with the added bonus of learning to use it in a supportive school environment. It allows…

iBooks Author Intro

IBooks Author is an amazing tool that allows you to create your own multi-touch book that can be viewed on an iPad or an Apple computer that runs the Mavericks operating system. You can create media rich books that enhance the reading and learning experience for your readers. There are a few important things to know about…