Comet Tech

Just after the calendar struck 2018, the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) released a great gift. The MDE approved the updated Technology Competencies for Students. This update, which is set to replace the 2009 Michigan Educational Technology Standards for Students (METS-S), is based largely upon the International Society for Technology in Education's (ISTE) 2016 Standards for Students. While the METS-S focused more on skills with the technology, the updated MITECS focus almost exclusively on the learning and doing with technology. This is moving away from a more tool-specific approach to a more holistic approach to technology integration. Dr. Liz Kolb, one of the keynotes that the Lake Michigan Tech Conference this summer, phrases it perfectly in her new book, Learning First, Technology Second . To paraphrase Dr. Kolb (2017), you don't choose the tool and then find the problem. The MITECS take that approach to technology integration. As students progress through thei...

This is something new that I wanted to start. Each mailing of the newsletter, I will be posting an App Highlight and sharing it with my teachers. The goal is to bring awareness to tools that people may not be as familiar with. Each App Highlight will focus on a website or tool that works with our Chromebook devices and has the potential, when used correctly, to enhance our student learning!  In the first edition of the Comet Tech App Highlight, I want to shed light on a tool that bills itself as "Interactive Formative Assessment." This is not a quiz game like Kahoot! or Quizlet, instead this service allows for you to build assessments for your student that mimic other online tests, like state standardized tests. Edulastic boosts over 25,000 Edulastic Certified Assessment questions and over 66,000 educator created questions. There is also a helpful search feature on the site to help navigate the nearly 100,000 questions. Some of the teacher created questions lack the d...