Diary of a Digital Learning Coach

Did you hear?  Apple recently hosted a huge education event in Chicago rolling out many changes to its products and software apps that have the potential to  impact education in a major way. There’s SO much good news from this event (including new devices priced for education) that my friend, Megan Kozar and I decided to break down some of our favorite updates for you vlog style in under 3 minutes! What devices do these work on? These awesome features work on any devices that run iOS 11.  Don’t forget to keep your iOS updated and update your apps periodically to get the smoothest experience! Even if your learner devices are older, you as an educator can use the updates to explore, practice and create materials for your classroom  - this is a great way to learn and explore so you are ready for when they do! What can YOU do with these to transform a learning experience? Need ideas?  Check in with your friendly neighborho...

I once read that in order to grow, we must learn something new everyday by getting out of our "comfort zones". I think we sometimes make this too hard - like we have to make a big jump like changing a job or a grade level or a school placement.  But the truth is that little steps out of our comfort zones have the potential to provide just as big shifts in thinking.   We just have to be open and take the step. Last week, I challenged myself and my team to ditch our MacBooks for a couple of days.  It doesn't seem that big of a challenge...after all, educators in our district have been issued both Macs AND iPads in order to support learning design for our 1:1 iPad district.  But what I found was that much too often, I default to using just my MacBook.  My team felt the same.   Now, we all tend to have a preferred device and there is nothing wrong with that.  However, I wondered what kept us going back to our MacBooks and how our perspect...

I’m so excited to be blogging from the TCEA (Texas Computer Education Association) conference in Austin, Texas this week! My team and I will be presenting several different sessions and I am so excited to be co-presenting “Apple in Education, We Say Yes!” on Thursday at 1:30! My Awesome Co-Presenters! In our session, we will celebrate the use of Apple in our district and encourage others to see the amazing educational value of Keynote, Pages, Numbers and Everyone Can Code.  Even if you are #notattcea, I encourage you to learn with us for this week’s installment of #anappleaweek. Simply go to www.flipgrid.com/AppleEDUyes , select a learning topic and click on the attached resource to begin exploring.   Attending TCEA and interested in more learning from the Coppell DLCs? Check out all of our session offerings below! Follow #TCEA and #TCEA18 for more great learning opportunities!   Check out other posts from this series here.

Welcome back to the Apple A Week series!  This  week, we continue by linking up with my amazing teammate, Megan Kozar .  Megan is my kindred spirit - a former K and 1 educator, she too believes in and lives the mantra "little kids can". This week on her site, The Light Bulb Lab , she has posted all you need to design quality documents with Apple's easy to use program, Pages.   Megan writes, " Pages for the iPad or Mac can be used as more than just a word processor. The features in pages allow the software to become a digital scrapbooking tool that allows you to create beautiful products by easily moving and manipulating features on the page. " I wholeheartedly agree.  Click below to check out her post! An Apple A Week: Pages What ideas do you have for using Pages in the Classroom?  We are curating a list of ideas on Flipgrid right now - we'd love to hear your ideas! Share your ideas for using Pages in the Classroom here! ...