Mr. B's Blog

I remember back to when I was in the first grade at the Bagnall School in Groveland, Massachusetts.  Our teacher told us about an exciting new room that no other class had been in.  We would be the first group of students to try out the school's new computer lab!  I remember walking into the room, basically a converted storage room with no windows and about 15 huge Apple computers.  My fondest memories of using technology in elementary school included playing the games "Oregon Trail" and "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego."  As a reflective educator, I also recall learning how to type and having pen pals with dog sled racers in Alaska.  Fastforward to 2015.  I have been teaching for seven years and have already gone through a full "edtech trend."  I consider an edtech trend something that hits the market and every teacher wants, though they don't know how to use and are not sure on its success for integration into actual les...

Google is offering 200 people involved with education to their office in Boston for a day of training.  They have asked anyone interested to apply to attend this event by publishing how 2015 will be the best year for student learning! For me, this is a year of clarity.  I've been teaching music for seven years and lately have seen a group of teachers in Massachusetts and surrounding states working on new common assessments for music.  I was interested in it at first and then the more I looked into it, found that assessment became the cornerstone of the music class and took over the curriculum, much like what it is doing in other subject areas which have high stakes testing.  I was looking to simplify the expectations, take out the randomness in the assignments I was giving, and provide clear definitions as to why I was teaching what I was teaching.  One day I was on Pinterest and saw the Recorder Karate curriculum...and thought, oh yeah, this works for 3rd and...

Last month I was contacted by Google to take a short online survey about their educational apps.  My main focus was asking: Why do you not have a learning management system?  As an adjunct at a few colleges and a former Virtual High School teacher, I know the Blackboard system all too well.  It is well known for being stuck in the 1990's and always being down for system updates.  I explained in the survey that although Google offers some learning management systems through the Chrome App Store, I will not trust them.  The main reason for this is that Blackboard is purchasing successful learning management companies left and right.  Training a team of educators on a new LMS takes a long time and it also take a long time for them to want to utilize and embrace it.  A free LMS might seem great but if it is extinct a year later, you lose a lot of traction with teachers who do not want to be trained on something new.  I also spoke to the fact that the ...

Vocab, vocab, and more vocab!  I think back to my days in English class as a student at Pentucket Regional High School.  Every week we were assigned a new vocab unit with 20 words to memorize.  We would use our vocab book to complete exercises, have a review on Thursday, and take a quiz on Friday.  We would swap quizzes with our classmates to correct them as a class.  This would usually follow with us students arguing that two different words could have been used to answer a certain question.  For some reason we all knew we could barter an extra point or two if we somehow came to a consensus that the question was too arbitrary to have just one answer.  We went through the same exact procedure for my Spanish class.  Music vocabulary was standard in our mid-terms and finals for concert band as well. The traditional norm of studying and reviewing vocabulary words is making flashcards.  Charades! Kids brings the excitement of knowledge acquisit...

www.vocaroo.com I discovered Vocaroo.com last year through Dr. Alex Ruthmann.  Vocaroo is an online voice recorder which gives you a link to the recording along with the ability to download in multiple forms.  It was not working on my school server when I tried it a few months.  I checked it out again yesterday as I was trying to find an alternative to Google Voice for another teacher who wanted a recording to last over three minutes.  I was pleasantly surprised that is fully functional and now even lets you upload recordings.  Sure you can do this on SoundCloud but you need to log into that.  As a teacher, I find that 20% of my time spent utilizing technology is filling out usernames and passwords.  Luckily, some cloud-based software are now letting you sign in with your Google account.  Vocaroo requires no username or password so it is a winner in my book.  You can even receive an embed code for your website.   One negative i...

Hi Everyone, I purchased the Samsung Google Chromebook for $250.00 from Best Buy back in October.  I think it is important to share my reviews about this technology.  A lot of schools right now are in a state of flux.  Do we buy iPads, Kindle Fires, new Windows laptops, or Chromebooks?  Everyone I talk to that has purchased a tablet has ended up buying an iPad.  So if you are going to use a device just for apps, by all means get an iPad!  Last year I worked in the Lowell Public Schools and they spent at least a million dollars on all new MacBook and iPad carts in every school.  I was in charge of the carts for two of the schools I worked in.  I can sum up the iPad up in this fashion: it is great for looking up information and online text books.  Apps, unless in special ed or foreign language, are really difficult to utilize in a normal lesson.  I am proud to say I don't own an iPad...I'm pretty content with my iPhone.  M...

With the new teacher evaluation system engulfing our school systems in  Massachusetts, music teachers are looking for creative ways to provide  evidence of formative assessment. Many ensemble directors require students to meet with them individually after  school to perform scales, solos, sight-reading, and repertoire.  Over the  last decade, new software has come out which makes it possible for students  to perform assignments online at home.  However, such software is often rising in costs each year and some students do not have a home computer with internet access.   What if there was a way for students to perform selections at home for free?  There is an answer and it is called Google Voice.  It is pretty simple as Google will offer a new phone number for each Google account which will  forward calls, voicemails, and text messages to any number of your choosing.  The voicemails in particular are saved as mp3...