Phillip Shrier - Masters Blog

 The following video is a presentation I created to show a possible integration of technology into a classroom instructional session regarding US Geography. https://youtu.be/y8YsNu8Cp1I Written Explanation The technology tool I am choosing is Sheppardsoftware.com. This website provides interactive maps where students can discover geography within the parameters that the teacher provides. I am choosing this specific tool to allow my students to interact at their own pace with the content being provided. After completing this lesson, I feel this was an engaging technology tool to enhance student knowledge of US Geography.  Looking back at this technology choice, this tool provides good pacing, individualized learning paths, and a smooth interface while also meeting the needs of the lesson objective.  Overall, I believe this was a good choice.   References   Fresh Air. (2011, Sept. 21). Love Longitude? ' Maphead ' Locates Geograph...

  Why d on’t kids love school?   Scott  Hebert says that at some point in our education , play, fun, and discovery are replaced with silence, standardization, and  schedule  ( Hebert, 2018 ).  The  benefit of having games in the classroom is to  generate curiosity, discovery, and   fun .     The challenge of introducing games into the classroom is when they are done as a fill-in for actual instruction.  As with  implementing  te chnology, games for the sake of games   is   meaningless (Wilson, 2016) .  The re  must  be an educational objective.     One strategy I have when gamifying a lesson is to be an expert  on  the topic.  I challenge my students to point out countries in Africa  faster than I can.  When I am engaged and knowledgeable, my students tend to be more excited about the content.     Conversely, gaming becomes inappropriate when t...

 The following is a video of my presentation regarding "Joining a Professional Organization": https://youtu.be/N5PSIVFtQ3c

According to Roblyer and Hughes (2019), we are living in the adaptive learning era where technological ubiquity allows schools to gather, track, and synthesize more data than ever before.   In a HBR article from 2012, Big Data is called the “Management Revolution” (Mcafee, 2012).   And that revolution includes schools.    Some of the physical data points we collect from students are attendance from Powerschool, feedback uploaded from other teachers on Google Drive, and, of course, grades from class assessments, among other data points.   The more data we collect, the more accurate our decisions will be about how to reach our students collectively and individually. When it comes to teaching my students how to gather data, I have been able to pass along my 15 years of expertise as a data analyst.  In one example, we compared the average monthly temperatures taken from two different cities: Nashville, TN and Sydney, Australia (Climate-Data, 2020). Once stude...