• Practice What You Preach

    When I was in the classroom, plagiarism was a big topic. I would always encourage my students to cite their sources. One brave student challenged me and asked where my citations were on my work that I shared. This caught me off guard. I had never thought it about like that. It changed the way…


  • The Little Things

    Relationships and the little things matter. As I continue to grow as a leader, I have the opportunity to connect with many people in many different places. As I have these interactions, it reminds me of how important relationships and the little things truly are. Even the things that we may not recognize as a…


  • Trending Forward

    About two years ago, I switched hosting providers with the goal to have everything back up and running within in a month. Then, COVID-19 came and my personal blog site fell to the wayside. Exactly two years to the day of everything starting to shutdown and hurrying home from the annual MACUL Conference with 4,000…


  • Finding Relevancy

    Fostering relationships is key to working with students. I do not think many people would debate that. The next part is finding engagement and relevancy. Engagement is one of the hardest things to measure in all education. Students can look engaged and not be engaged in anything but their own thoughts. The key is to…


  • Teaching and Learning

    Recently, I finished the book A New Culture of Learning by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown that was published in 2011. The book was a fascinating, albeit slightly out of date, reflection on how teaching and learning have changed over the last twenty years, especially examining the impact of new technology during the time…


  • Rubrics – Killing Creativity?

    If you are at all like me, you have sat through a student presentation that left much to be desired. When sitting down to apply a grade to the student’s work, they score surprising well on the rubric. The student managed to stumble through a presentation, barely grasping the concepts, and then scored surprising well…


  • What Our Curriculum Needs

    Over the last few weeks, I have had the opportunity to dig deep into the ISTE Standards for Students (aka MITECS here in the Mitten) and the ISTE Standards for Educators. While everyone is recognizing that technology is becoming ubiquitous in our society, we still aren’t emphasizing the skills necessary to leverage the technology in…


  • Focus & Engagement with Students

    It is has been a while since I posted. Wanted to get back into it during the busiest time of the year!  In the last few weeks, I have been reflecting on a couple of books and a training that I went through almost five years ago. I was fortunate to attend a Schlechty Center…


  • Change – Do Something Great

    It’s been a little while since my last post. I have been extremely busy. Between ISTE and hosting the Lake Michigan Tech Conference, much has been happening. Much has been happening in my local district as well. Change is an inevitable part of the educational process, in fact, we hope for change from day one…


  • When a Grade is more than Academics

                    At the 2018 MACUL Conference, I joined a conversation around the topic of grading in the classroom, and one thing that popped up in the conversation was the idea of compliance-based grading. This was a topic that I have heard and dealt with before, but this renewed…