I've never liked the band that my pixel watch came with but I also don't really like any of the options I've found to replace it. So, I decided to make my own. I started by designing it in Corel Vector:

One of my favorite books growing up was A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin. The original edition was illustrated with wood cuts by Ruth Robbins. I loved those illustrations. My favorite was the hawk in flight, circling above a tower keep. It's a great scene in the book, masterfully captured by...

“Unions are a better invention than chatGPT”
...

I have a word problem. The words are Disorder, Deficit, Disability, and Disease. They all start with the letter D but that’s just a coincidence.

Let me take a step back....

I had a weird idea the other day: what if I trained an AI text generator on my own writing? What would it produce? The idea kept nagging at me until this weekend I finally had a free couple of hours and dug in. I used a python package I found on Github called

I'm writing a new middle grade fantasy book that features a stone age flute. While doing research, I came across this tutorial on how to make a branch flute and decided to give it a try.

At my school, we have four pillars that represent our values and philosophy: Character, Community, DEIJ, and Academic Excellence.

I’ve read A LOT of books featuring neurodivergent characters. Why? First, to find good books for my own kid. Second, to see what else was out there when I set out to write my own neurodivergent characters. Third, because I volunteered to be a reader/reviewer for our Just...

"Expect a wild ride from Engine Nine. Author Bradley W. Wright delivers a book full of twists and turns, big revelations, and jaw-dropping moments...Lovers of mystery-suspense novels will have a good time reading Engine Nine." - Jaylynn Korrell,...

I wrote this article for shepherd.com about my favorite mystery novels:

I was invited to present at the Make: Education Forum 2022 this last fall. I talked about my 5th grade board game project (more details in this blog post). It was a lot of fun and the...

There is a bird family nesting in a potted palm hanging from a beam in one of the outdoor atriums at our early childhood center. The teachers asked me to set up a web cam so the students could see inside the nest and follow the progress from eggs to hatching to fledging. This was a great...

My 4th grade robotics students are having trouble engineering their catapults so I made this prototype to inspire them.

This is my super simple, basic granola recipe. I don't like to add any seeds or dried fruit (because they tend to cook faster than the oats) or nuts (because my spouse has an allergy). I generally sprinkle pumpkin seeds and raisins on top when I eat it but not as part of the recipe.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, board game sales have skyrocketed. I thought it would be fun to have 5th graders design and build their own board games.

When your students graduate, you need to disable their accounts. Doing it one by one in the Google Workspace admin panel can be tedious. I created this BASH script that uses GAM to do all the work for me.

For our last project in 5th grade Design + Code + Make this year we did an integrated unit with Science. The students learned about the wetlands biome (our school is located near the Ballona Wetlands). Each student was assigned an animal that is found in the wetlands. They researched the animal...

Thank you to everyone who attended my session on Saturday! Here is my presentation:

We're doing a Scratch unit with 5th grade right now so I created this game to remind myself how everything works. It's been a while since I did anything in Scratch.

We haven't had kids on campus to get their school photos taken this year. So, I decided to have parents take yearbook portrait photos themselves and upload them via a Google Form. The problem: the spreadsheet created by the Google form has a link to the uploaded file but doesn't include the...

My son loves waffles but I don't love how he acts when his blood sugar plummets an hour after eating them. So, I came up with this high protein, high fiber waffle recipe. We lovingly call them 'hippie waffles' because my wife was raised by hippies and grew up eating homemade tofu.

I attend a lot of conferences, meetings, and workshops aimed at educational technology professionals. Something I see too often is a conflation of these two concepts: educational technology and technology education. I think it's vital to make the distinction. Remembering that these are two...

Book 2 in the Justin Vincent Series: Master thief Justin Vincent and his computer hacker partner Ashna help people recover stolen items when the authorities can't. This time, their client needs his missing research notes back—notes that could help provide the solution to a century old...

I'm preparing a 5th grade project where the students will design and laser cut rubber band powered airplanes. This is my first prototype. I definitely need to angle the wings to create more lift and use a lighter material.

As a quarantine project, my son and I created this text based adventure game. He designed it and I helped him program. He's 7 so expect weirdness. He got into this via Zork which we played to help with his reading.

I'm teaching a robotics challenge elective this spring over Zoom. I meet with the students once/week and give them a new challenge. The challenge this week is to make a robot that can 'floss'. This is my attempt:

One of our 5th Grade teachers is going out on maternity leave. The other 5th grade faculty wanted to have the students make a present for her in my DCM class and asked for my suggestion. I remembered an amazing mobile my son had when he was a baby and suggested we have each student design a round...

I’m teaching an intro to Python elective this trimester. The students are learning the basics via the Codecademy intro course and then they get to try programming a robot arm. I used an ArmUno 2.0 kit from Microbot...

I’m teaching 5th Grade Design + Code + Make for the first time this year. Previously, 5th Grade was rolled into our lower school for technology classes and the curriculum was not integrated with our middle school arc. In middle school, we focus on design thinking, entrepreneurship, making,...

I have been working as a technologist and teacher in independent schools for twelve years. I respected teachers before I started working in education but I really respect them now. I teach a maximum of about 3.5 hours per day. Most days are less than that. Teachers who are in the classroom for...

Back in 2015 I wrote about the Economist magazine's 'skills of the future' supplement. Just this morning I got an email from Google about their new 'future of the classroom' global report. It seems like...

I ran across a fascinating article by Andy Matuschak about how hard it is to learn much of anything from a non-fiction book. The basic premise is...

I recently did an LED circuit project with a group of first graders. It was challenging to figure out a way to make it easy enough for their limited fine motor skills and attention spans but also engaging and fun. I experimented with my own first grader and came up with a good compromise.

My son is in a bit of a Trolls phase. Favorite movie. Favorite song (I got this feelin' inside my bones...). Troll figurines. Etc. He wanted to make troll pods like the trolls live in in the movie. We decided to make them via a papier mache process. Step 1: make a frame out of wire and...

"...life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced."

I love this essay by Syambra Moitozo about what it was like to have Steve Wozniak teach her computer class in 1995. Some great quotes from Woz:

I recently gave a presentation to parents at our school titled Children in a Digital World. The focus was current research on screen time, educational technology, and helping kids stay safe online. Here is the slideshow in PDF format. Some of the slides will not be that informative without...

I was asked recently to write an Ed Tech Philosophy Statement. Here is what I came up with:

I'm co-teaching the journalism/yearbook class this year. My part of the class focuses on graphic design and page layout. When I was studying design I had a grumpy old teacher who learned his craft from some of the original Bauhaus people in Chicago. Of course, all modern design work is done on...

Our Lower School science teacher recently asked me to help her find a good system for creating a field guide for our campus. Our school is located in a semi-rural area on about 10.5 acres. There are lots of trees, flowers, bugs, and woodland creatures. I did some research and found a great site...

I created this inventory management system because I couldn't find one with features specific to schools and without a lot of other unnecessary features cluttering up the UI.

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has published a report that attempts to identify key skills students need to learn now in order to be well prepared when they enter the workforce. The report was

I taught a beginning Python programming class this Spring using the Codecademy intro to Python curriculum (http://www.codecademy.com/en/tracks/python). The class went well and the students seemed to enjoy it. Here are a few things I would...

This OS X command line tool is very handy. Every time I need it though I have to google it to remember what it’s called. So, I’m making a blog post to remind myself. Hopefully it will be useful to others who happen across this post.

http://qz.com/399360/four-ways-to-tell-if-an-educational-app-will-actually-help-your-child-learn/

This is a great article. It offers some (much needed) historical context to the claims often made by school reform advocates that our education system is structurally analogous to the factory system as it existed over one hundred...