I’m pleased to be a presenter at the 2026 Educators Rising National Conference in Portland. I’m leading a breakout session on gamification and using the psychology of game design in instruction. I hope to have both teacher leaders and students in my session. I started exploring gamification in my last job with the Virginia Department… Continue reading Gamification at Educators Rising – June 2026
All my essays, guides, and more
The Four Phases of a Game
Games, according to Chou (2019), typically have four phases. Think of these as phases the player experiences as they play the game. So, I’ve been watching Season 3 of Squid Game on Netflix. I don’t want to give anything away, but it’s easy to see these elements in the portrayal of the survival games on… Continue reading The Four Phases of a Game
Four Elements of Game Experiences
I’m not a game designer. But, it wouldn’t be a stretch to call me a designer. Nor would it be a stretch to call teachers designers. They design experiences for others to have in order to learn. Teachers are Designers The staid way to describe this work is lesson planning. Planning isn’t a word I… Continue reading Four Elements of Game Experiences
Sharing with iCloud
Among the Apple productivity apps, I use Keynote every single day in my work. I develop a lot of graphics and many of those get used on webpages or in social media. Having pre-sized Keynote decks for each purpose (Linked In, or WordPress Hero Images) makes it easy not only to pull from previous work,… Continue reading Sharing with iCloud
Ejecting Disks in MacOS with Shortcuts
In working from home, I shuttle between two MacBooks in my home office setting. I use a Thunderbolt dock to connect external drives (both spinning and solid state) that I want access to on each computer. In addition, I have a USB-connected keyboard and I re-use my mouse by changing Bluetooth channels. But ejecting all… Continue reading Ejecting Disks in MacOS with Shortcuts
Adventures in Using LLMs
This past week I’ve been using the three major LLMs available to the general public: ChatGPT, Microsoft Co-Pilot, and Google Gemini. I’m not writing this to compare the three, but to report out how a few things I’ve learned and how I’ve adopted these tools to help me in one of my hobbies. Image Generation… Continue reading Adventures in Using LLMs
Original Macintosh Grayscale Dithering
Those who may be interested in the original Macintosh design (based upon Apple Lisa) may already know that it was a black and white machine. At the time, this was a significant drawback considering the Apple // and IBM PC computers had color. Likewise, when the NeXT Cube launched, the original display was grayscale. Color… Continue reading Original Macintosh Grayscale Dithering
Photo Management Recommendations for MacOS
I was recently asked (again) for recommendations for photo management from folks who use Apple products (iPhone, Mac). I wanted to capture my thoughts on this publicly for others who may need advice. I’ve lived with Apple’s iPhoto (now Photos) app for some time. I’m not a professional photographer and started out with a point… Continue reading Photo Management Recommendations for MacOS
Will you be that one?
When I was growing up through my teenage years, I created a large number of original works on piano. My method was to keep playing them and elaborate upon the ideas over time. I rarely wrote anything down, I kept it all in my head. As I grew older, past college, I lost the ability… Continue reading Will you be that one?
How we learn
Reflecting Sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m a reflective person. And among all the things that have fascinated me about the field of education is how we learn, and to some extent, how this body of growing knowledge may contradict classroom practices. I remember well thinking I had “how to learn” mastered by… Continue reading How we learn