Introducing Sparky

Wearing Elphaba's hat in
front of the Wicked display.

Once again I was fortunate to attend the Thursday professional day at New York Comic Con. This year, I unfortunetly missed the panels I wanted to attend due to my train being delayed in New Jersey but I still got to enjoy a few hours and explore some great exhibits.

There were tons of comics, movies, books, and more. I didn't take many selfies this year but I did snag a photo at the Wicked display. I also spoke with publishers again. There are some great books coming out this year including the new prequel to The Hunger Games which will be based around Haymitch's story.

Sparky
Your Spark of Inspiration

I also introduced my new travel companion, Sparky, to a few people. Have I told you about Sparky yet? No? Well, let me introduce you. When I was traveling full-time for my previous role, I saw some amazing things when I visited classrooms—from Pinterest-worthy bulletin boards to random “Little Libraries” in airports. I wanted to share these sparks of inspiration and turn it into a social media campaign.

For a while, I had a vision of creating a personal mascot. However, I couldn’t come up with a unique idea that I could actually bring to life. I thought about doing something like Flat Stanley (where the idea stemmed from), but I wanted it to be a little more three-dimensional. My favorite Disney character has always been Figment—sorry Mickey. I found Sparky on a random shelf at a local store and immediately fell in love with this purple dragon. Sparky is a Ty Puffie named Spark, a bean-based stuffy about the size of a tennis ball. I know the name Sparky doesn’t sound like an original rename, but I love names that end with the "E" sound. I’m Cor-E. My dog is Ben-E… you get it. Thus, Spark-E was born.

Sparky already has a social media presence, and their website is a work in progress. Check out their link page for all the profiles or head over to their website, Sparky Inspires. Most handles are @SparkyInspires, but if that wasn’t available, I added the number 42. I couldn’t decide on Sparky’s gender, and after some thought, I chose to make them non-binary. After all, Sparky is an inanimate object.

---

Disclaimer: I received free access on Thursday of New York Comic Con (NYCC) through their educator professional pass program.

Return to the Classroom

 I've been thinking of this for a while. When I go out to schools, why do teachers listen to me? I may be considered an expert in educational technology but I haven't been in a classroom in years. When I was teaching, I always hated those so-called experts that rode in on their hypothetical white horse to serve as the white knight saving the day with a new program or software. Something that they claim would make my life as a teacher that much easier.

This past year my career has gone through a lot of changes. While I'm looking for my next adventure, I decided to return to the classroom. This decision though included a decision within the decision. I know that I'm the type of person that wouldn't want to leave mid-year but I also knew I wanted to keep looking for a new role that would allow me to work with a variety of educators and continue presenting at conference.

As this new school year begins, I have placed my name on the substitute teacher list for a few local organizations. This past week, I spent the entire week in one high school classroom while they waited for a new teacher to finish on-boarding. This opportunity was even more interesting because Sunday night, the charter school system where I was substitute teacher was hit with a network outage that lasted the entire week.

This was my first time in a classroom since pre-Covid shutdowns and there I am in a room full of high school students with Chromebooks who can't use their Chromebooks. Not only was the outage the internet, but also the VOIP phone lines, email systems, and loudspeakers. It was crazy to see how much this school relied on their network. A news article about the outage showed the network's administration "...stated the issue did not impact classroom instruction. However, students and parents disagreed, especially since much of the instruction is online and Chromebooks are used."

I walked into the building as was told students had assignments on Google Classroom to complete. Ten minutes later, the dean of students walked in with a stack of photocopies. The students even asked what the packets had to do with Physics and Chemistry (the classes I was responsible for) because they were articles about famous scientists with ELA style questions. The dean told me she found them in the previous teacher's emergency files because even the copy machines were down due to the network. 

I spent a full week with these students and Monday afternoon, after speaking with the dean, I bought some offline supplies in. While students were still provided packets every day, I had the dean's permission to do other things. I understand that Physics and Chemistry aren't the same but I am not a Chemistry teacher and I also didn't want to do anything too extreme while a guest in the school. We ended up doing the paper tower challenge. This is an activity I normally do as an ice breaker for adults but it was great for the students. Each group was given six sheets of copy paper and one foot of tape. I then gave each group one text book form the book shelf.

Since I was a guest, I didn't not take any pictures in the classroom but I was very impressed by the engineering skills these students demonstrated. I'm excited to see where I'm sent next.

Learning Through Play

I recently saw a teacher post online about creating a coordinated plane battleship game. And this got me thinking because the whole premise of battleship is the coordinated plane.

Throughout our childhood and the childhood of our students many board games have been played. Many of these board games have academic relationships and I think it's something that has been discussed but not often enough. So here are a few of my favorite games along with how they can be related to curriculum and standards.

Monopoly
Monopoly is probably the most easiest game to justify because you are learning a lot of skills within the game that relate to both mathematics and economics. For a social studies or business teacher with an economics class, The history of Monopoly along with the practical gameplay easily help students to recognize how business works along with concepts such as taxes and mortgages. Just make sure you find an older version since newer Monopoly boards have a flat tax instead of the 10%. Lazy game producers.

Scrabble

Spelling anyone? Scrabble rewards the use of less common letters more than popular letters. Additionally there is a strategy involved when players try to time their words to reach the triple word score or a double/corner word. Additionally points can be scored by building on another word. For examples if the word run is on the board, add n i n g to make it running and  scoring even more points.

Battleship
Battleship is a game that teaches strategy and the mathematical concept of coordinated planes. Students have to know their XY axis along with being able to track and plan ahead for the different ships.

Guess Who?
Guess Who is a classic game where you can only use yes or no questions to narrow down the suspects until you solve the problem. This helps younger students learn how to be descriptive along with organizational skills to track the different characters.

Operation
Operation on its face value is not truly academic because no student is going to be presiding over a surgery where they are removing a funny bone from someone's arm. However the game itself in its construction is academic. When students are playing operation, they are learning about circuitry because in order to make the light bulb light up and buzz the circuit needs to be complete. The gripper is in essence the switch. I have even seen some students use a MakeyMakey with foil and cardboard to build their own version of Operation.

Mousetrap

Rube Goldberg machines are a favorite of science teachers while teaching about simple machines. From pullies, to screws, Mousetrap is a great example of these complex collections of simple machines.

No not all board games are created equal and there are definitely a few which do not serve any academic value. However even those games can most likely be justified or potentially modified. Have students multiple two dice instead of add. Or