-
Bragging Time
We are a week in to our TEDx project, and my students have made their first posts on their blogs. It has been so much fun for me to read their posts and learn a little more about my students and their passions. I have also noticed students who are usually quiet and timid have…
-
Everything Wrong With Internet Filtering
Ran into my first major problem with my TEDx project today. Well, I say “major problem,” but I really mean “minor but recurring problem requiring a big change.” Anyways, the problem is that blog.com is awful. It clearly hasn’t had anybody coding on it for a couple of years at least, and even the blog…
-
Technology is Not The End All
Thought this was worth sharing.
-
TEDxWOHS Parent Responses
Yesterday, as you probably already know, I introduced the TEDx project to my students.. In addition, I sent an email to their parents that included the link to the project details as well as a quick rundown of what the project entails. The parent responses have been awesome. I sent this out to about 60…
-
Teacher’s Throwing Out Grades
Last weekend, I listened to Starr Sackstein (@mssackstein) talk with Nicholas Provenzano about the No Grades Movement. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard about this theory, but given my new outlook on my career and life, I gave it more thought than I had before. In the past, I have always dismissed the idea.…
-
TED Talk Project – A Student Experiment
As I enter my final weeks in the classroom, I find myself wanting to make a splash. Thanks to inspiration from Nicholas Provenzano (@thenerdyteacher) and his #NerdyCast, I’ve really wanted to do a project based assignment, and with my new position as DCIC, I wanted it to be tech-centric. Then, during my 1st period class today, I…
-
Cool Tool for School – EdPuzzle.com
Today, I spent some time using EdPuzzle, and I wanted to share my experience with it. EdPuzzle is a website that allows you to “Make any video your lesson.” In it’s simplest form, it allows you to give it a video (either by upload or link to web video) and add stopping points. At the…
-
Social Media in School
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about social media being used in school and in the classroom. There is great benefit to student use of social media, but some very clear concerns as well. Having an online presence is becoming as important for people as a credit score. We, as a society, have become so…
-
Harsh Conversations With Myself
It has been an interesting year for me. For a couple of personal reasons (the details of which I don’t really want to get into here), I have written nearly nothing in a year. I haven’t found myself in a writing mood. I didn’t even win NaNoWriMo this year, and for anyone that knows me,…
-
Audiobooks: Are They Really Reading?
Despite what the title may imply, this post simply will not answer that question, partly because I don’t actually have an answer and mostly because I’m too lazy to research the answer in any way. I have had friends tell me before that they have “read that book,” and then proceed to talk about the…
-
What the Future Means to Writers – or – Some Advice to A Friend
A friend of mine said to me on twitter today, “Brad, kind of struggling lately with the idea of being a writer, given so few people read these days. Any recommendations?” It was an innocuous enough question, and he was probably just looking for me to say “Keep at it!” or “You’re great!” or some…
-
How to Setup Automatic Redundant Free Backup
So here’s the step-by-step that I promised a few days ago. For this, I will be assuming you use Scrivener, but as I said before, this would be possible with any program that has an automatic backup option. Downloads Install both of these programs on your computer. Default settings on both are fine. Google Drive: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/drive (you’ll…
-
For Writers: How to Get Automatic Free Redundant File Backup
Today, I was clearing out some old Scrivener backup files and wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have been. Somehow, deleting one of the backup archives broke my current Scrivener project and dumped me back to where I was on my WIP two months ago, effectively losing 5 full chapters (and a ton…
-
Time Travel – Or – How to Make a Blog Post with Next to no Effort
So I really don’t know what the long term purpose of this blog will be, but for today I hope to make some people laugh. I was digging around my stuff and stumbled across this post that I wrote a few years ago and laughed at it, so I thought I’d share it with all…
-
Submitting to Agents – Or Querying: The 10th Circle
As I said previously, I have begun the Querying Process, submitting my query and such to literary agents in the hope of getting representation for my work. I completely blame the misery and pain I have been experiencing non-stop for the last week on my friend and torturer Eileen Caines (check-out her blog here: neverwordless.wordpress.com). She…
-
New and Used Blog
Recently, I started submitting some of my work to literary agents, and it is a long, tiring, stressful process that I will most likely delve deeper into in future blog posts. For the purposes of this post, suffice-it to say that it has made me feel a little down. I realized that part of why…
-
10 Reasons You Should Do NaNoWriMo
As you all know, I’m a huge supporter of NaNoWriMo and The Office of Letters and Lights. They posted this on their blog today, and I love it, so I’m sharing. Here is the link to the original: http://blog.lettersandlight.org/post/32671611607/10-reasons-you-should-do-nanowrimo National Novel Writing Month is just around the bend! How around the bend? The sites are…
-
askDavid.com Promotion
askDavid.com is a book promotion site that is GREAT for indie authors. I submitted my book to them a few weeks ago, and they posted it to their site today! They post it on their site and promote it for you a little. It is easy and free. Check out the link here: http://askdavid.com/reviews/book/fantasy/1653 If…
Courses
Sheets for School Leaders
Learn how to make all your data dynamic so that you never have to do the same thing twice with your spreadsheets.