Tag Archives: PD

December 8, 2019 · 9:35 pm

Gathering my tweets and pics from today’s awesome #CCFestNYC hosted at @ITP_NYU. Thank you for organizing another inspiring event, @ed_saber!

Below are some photos of NYU ITP‘s new space on Jay Street in Brooklyn:

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June 23, 2018 · 6:04 pm

Gathering my tweets, photos, and notes from #Picademy in Jersey City. Thank you, @Raspberry_Pi for two days of inspiring, exciting, fun, and thought-provoking professional development! #STEMed #STEAM #MakerEd

I felt incredibly fortunate to be in a room of educators on June 21-22 for two days of Picademy hosted at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, New Jersey! The workshops were led by Andrew Collins (Educator Training Manager at ) and Raspberry Certified Teachers from previous co-horts (Amanda Haughs, Chantell Mason, , and ). There was a separate Picademy June 18-19 and other networking opportunities throughout the week facilitated by Dana Augustin (Educator Program Coordinator at ). Per Picademy’s website:

Picademy is the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s free face-to-face professional development programme that supports educators throughout their digital making and computing journey. This two-day training event is held at venues around the UK and North America. After completing the programme, educators join a community of passionate digital making practitioners.Interested in attending? Visit our event calendar to find a Picademy near you.

Day 1 consisted of a crash course in setting up the Raspberry Pi (HDMI to a screen, USB to keyboard and mouse, power cord, SD card) and gaining insights into a variety of attachments and HATs (GPIO boards, Sense Hat, Explorer Hat Pro, Piano Hat, Mini Black Hat Hack3r, Camera Module V2, Traffic Light add on).

Day 2 was an opportunity to break into groups and have extended time to develop a project prototype. I partnered with Cathy Knives Chau and Lauren Berrios, and we created PiPix, a portable RaspberryPi powered Polaroid-inspired camera that can be picked up by students at any time to take pictures of class projects or on class trips. Different filters can be applied, and photos would be uploaded to a class Twitter stream. We successfully designed a countdown timer to display on the SenseHat, enabled the SenseHat’s joystick to take the picture, and had a random filter applied to the captured image. We needed more time to have the joystick be used to choose a filter and/or allow the user to choose to capture an image or an animated GIF. We were on the verge of integrating our program with Twitter’s API (Thanks to Cathy!), but didn’t manage this in time. Cathy, Lauren, and I are hoping to gather later in the summer to complete a successful PiPix prototype!

Here’s our code so far…

# PiPix
# Using SenseHat for Geo location, four buttons for filters, countdown
# Use imestamp and direc tion from joystick on SenseHat
from picamera import PiCamera
from gpiozero import Button
from sense_hat import SenseHat, ACTION_PRESSED, ACTION_HELD, ACTION_RELEASED
from time import sleep
from signal import pause
import random
import datetime
import time
#import tweepy
#import json
camera = PiCamera()
sense = SenseHat()
#with open(‘twitterauth.json’) as file:
#    secrets=json.load(file)
#auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(secrets[‘consumer_key’], secrets[‘consumer_secret’])
#auth.set_access_token(secrets[‘access_token’], secrets[‘access_token_secret’])
#twitter = tweepy.API(auth)
randeffect = [‘colorswap’,’watercolor’,’cartoon’,’sketch’]
t = (7, 219, 252)
a = (252, 113, 7)
countdown1 = [
    t, t, t, t, a, t, t, t,
    t, t, t, a, a, t, t, t,
    t, t, t, t, a, t, t, t,
    t, t, t, t, a, t, t, t,
    t, t, t, t, a, t, t, t,
    t, t, t, t, a, t, t, t,
    t, t, t, t, a, t, t, t,
    t, t, t, a, a, a, t, t]
countdown2 = [
   t, t, t, a, a, a, t, t,
   t, t, a, t, t, t, a, t,
   t, t, t, t, t, t, a, t,
   t, t, t, t, t, a, t, t,
   t, t, t, t, a, t, t, t,
   t, t, t, a, t, t, t, t,
   t, t, a, t, t, t, t, t,
   t, t, a, a, a, a, a, t]
countdown3 = [
    t, t, a, a, a, a, t, t,
    t, t, t, t, t, t, a, t,
    t, t, t, t, t, t, a, t,
    t, t, t, a, a, a, t, t,
    t, t, t, t, t, t, a, t,
    t, t, t, t, t, t, a, t,
    t, t, t, t, t, t, a, t,
    t, t, a, a, a, a, t, t]
# Joystick
def capture(event):
    if event.action !=ACTION_RELEASED:
        camera.start_preview(alpha=192)
        sense.set_pixels(countdown3)
        sleep(.5)
        sense.set_pixels(countdown2)
        sleep(.5)
        sense.set_pixels(countdown1)
        sleep(.5)
        date = datetime.datetime.now().strftime(“%m_%d_%Y_%H_%M_%S”)
        camera.image_effect = random.choice (randeffect)
        camera.capture(“/home/pi/joy_image{0}.jpg”.format(date))
        camera.stop_preview()
sense.stick.direction_any = capture
#for i in range(4):
#        camera.image_effect = random.choice(randeffect)
#        camera.capture(“/home/pi/PiPix{0}.jpg”.format(i))

Chantell captured some video of our presentation and shared it via Twitter. Her tweet is pasted below:

Below, I’ve gathered my tweets from the two-day workshop:

And here are two tweets which include info about stuff I need to explore further…

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February 7, 2017 · 12:57 pm

Pics and resources from “Speaking to Listen in the Age of Emoji” with @D_L_Potts @mritzius today:

Today, I co-led a full-day Speaking to Listen in the Age of Emoji workshop with Diana Potts and Mike Ritzius. Many thanks to Barbara Swanson, Associate Director for Professional Development at NYSAIS, for supporting us and Amy Brandt and Dennis Guidera of Steelcase Education for hosting us!

Here are our slides:

Here is the resource sheet we shared (with links to readings, resources, and handouts all in one space): 

Here is the original description from the NYSAIS page:

The skill of effective communication has powerful influence in shaping school culture. Teachers, students and leadership are surrounded by feedback on a daily basis from the classroom to meetings to the playing field.

Understanding how to communicate can be the difference between listening to react and listening to understand. How one hears, processes and delivers feedback can be powerful in shaping the tone of personal and professional relationships. In this workshop, theory, practice and your experiences will be used to examine what it takes to host effective and productive conversations with colleagues and students.

This seminar, for teachers and administrators of all grades,  will prepare participants to initiate better and more productive conversations with their colleagues, students, and parents. We will introduce a series of frameworks and skillsets which will enhance the way we speak and listen to each other.

This session includes:

  • Identifying types of feedback
  • Identifying perspective of knowings
  • Supporting different ways of knowing
  • Methods of hearing and giving feedback (even when you don’t want to)
  • Empathic Listening:an exercise is listening
  • Amygdala Hijack: identifying your triggers for grounded conversations
  • Four-fold Practice: a framework for mindful conversations
  • Levels of Speaking and Listening from Theory U: A framework for moving conversations to a co-generative space)
  • World Cafe: Creating a space for conversations leading to invested action

Here are some photos from the day:

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December 1, 2016 · 6:45 pm

Guest speaking about being a Tech Coordinator & growing my #PLN. @TC_CMLTD @TeachersCollege

I’m proud to be an alumna of the Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design Program at Teachers College, Columbia University where I earned my MA (2001) and EdM (2016) in Instructional Technology and New Media. (The next step would be a Doctorate, but unless I get an honorary one like Bono, I’m not sure I have the willpower to do so…)

Professor Chang, my patient and helpful thesis advisor, invited me to speak with her core seminar students tonight about my “experience and expertise in implementing and learning with technology in the classroom.” I prepared the slides above to lightly outline and illustrate why I think curating a Personalized (or Professional) Learning Network is super valuable. I also included suggestions for how to locate and connect with people synchronously and asynchronously, online and offline, personally and professionally. For inspiration about what to talk about, I turned to the abstract for my EdM paper which is pasted below:

This paper considers that investing time in growing a Personalized Learning Network (PLN) by interacting with other professionals in the field synchronously and asynchronously, online and offline, socially and professionally will lead to the ultimate reward of being a more engaged, informed, and connected educator in the 21st Century. This inevitably will enable access to people and information that will further enrich the educator and their community. There are distinct advantages to building and leveraging a PLN to learn, share, network, and collaborate as a career teacher both online and offline. Additionally, maintaining a personal portfolio is a valuable resource towards professional growth and building your network as it helps educators engage in a metacognitive study of their own teaching and learning, legitimize their online presence, and expand their PLN. Much research points towards the value of growing a PLN and digital portfolio curation and the role these play in a 21st Century educator’s practice.

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