I am an inventor.

I always have been. When I was a kid, as most children do, I invented games, puzzles, songs, and stories. I also experienced mild obsessions with anything that had to do with construction marvels such as the Pyramids, the Statue of Liberty, and the RMS Titanic. I often imagined designing and building my very own working kid-sized car out of cardboard. I dreamed of becoming either an astronaut or a dental hygienist.

As a young adult, I became even more fascinated by the mysteries and possibilities of science and engineering. The Jetsons, Gilligan’s Island, MacGyver, Star Trek, and pretty much anything on PBS were among my favorite TV shows. For me, Back to the Future Part II was the most engaging installment of the franchise. Books such as Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss, Feed by M.T. Anderson, The Martian by Andy Weir, and the biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Lewis Latimer, Madam C.J. Walker, and other inventors have captivated me throughout my life.

As an adult, my fascination continues. Before there were to-do and shopping list apps, I created my own customized grocery list system in an MS Word doc. I would print out the document, sorted by store aisles or areas, rip it into sections, and distribute among my family members, so that we could each shop the different sections of our list at once, and cut down on the overall shopping time. Later, I converted the customized list into a Google Doc, and we were able to collaborate and check off the list on our phones, in real time, while shopping.

I have joyously spent a great amount of personal time volunteering and working at the Newark Museum, the Liberty Science Center, and the Thomas Edison National Historical Park. I can sit at my computer for extremely long stretches, working on multiple tasks, learning, building, creating, losing all sense of time, until I finally realize that hours have passed. I enjoy the challenge of figuring out how to single-handedly put together a furniture item that really requires the support of another person–oh, and wordless assembly directions can’t stop me!

I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of building a better mousetrap, of finding innovative and efficient ways of approaching everyday problems. I can attest to the proverb, “Necessity is the mother of invention”. I started out my career teaching in schools that provided me scarce resources, limited supply budgets, and tight schedules. I quickly learned that if I wanted my students and myself to find success, I would have to develop ways of turning lemons into lemonade. So, that is when my inventing really took off. My inventions have for the most part been unimpressive or unuseful to the public, but have significantly improved my own life.

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An example of my teacher inventions

Back in the 90s and the 2000 decade, teachers used a bulky device called an overhead projector. We would write on transparencies (plastic sheets) with wet-erase markers, and the projector would display the messages on a screen. It was nothing like the document cameras of today, which project a crisp image of whatever is within the view of the lens. Anyway, I hated how my hands would get stained with marker each day while rinsing off the transparencies for reuse. It was a messy process.

At the end of the school day, I could take all the transparencies to the sink and rinse all at once, but throughout the day, I needed to be able to make impromptu changes and to spot-clean. Using the corner of a damp paper towel or tissue yielded disastrous results. I tried a lot of unsuccessful methods to make less of a mess. Finally, I figured it out! I cut a little piece of sponge and stapled it to the eraser of a pencil. Then I could dip the sponge into a small container of water, squeeze out the excess water onto a nearby dry paper towel, and use the device to clean off small portions of the marked transparencies. It worked like a charm! I got a good amount of long-term use out of that simple invention.

An example of my teaching systems

Studies show that working in small groups and one on one with students is when the most important learning takes place. Within smaller settings, teachers can better identify individual needs and prescribe customized learning plans. Once I began to realize all of this, the challenge became how to manage small-group and one-on-one schedules. It’s tricky when you have only 60-90 minutes to devote to daily reading instruction and there are so many required components to the reading lesson. And even if I could manage to plan and implement the schedules successfully, it was very difficult to keep track and document each student’s progress. Another huge problem that I noticed was that the students scheduled for certain days, especially Mondays, would miss their small group time more often than other students, due to regular events such as holiday closings.

I solved these problems by creating intricate Google spreadsheets. Each week, I copy and paste a new set of columns to the top left of the spreadsheet so that the most current schedule appears at a glance. I can scroll to the right if I want to view the previous weeks. I color code within the cells, and use the “add note” function to keep track of student progress, in real time, while teaching. This has created a paperless system of documentation that I can access at work and at home when I need to find out how individual students are doing, and to plan for future instruction.

To address the issue of certain students missing more days than others, I created a new scheduling system. Instead of the typical Monday groups, Tuesday groups, etc. we now use a Day One, Day Two schedule. So, if the Day Five groups meet on a Friday and there is a school closing on the following Monday, the Day One groups meet on Tuesday. The Google spreadsheet helps me to easily keep track of this schedule as well.

My long term relationship with Google Sheets

When I discovered Microsoft Windows and the World Wide Web during college in the 90s, these new tools opened my mind to brand new possibilities. I found an environment which I could manipulate, control, and use as an outlet to be creative. I quickly stood out as an individual comfortable navigating a computer. I learned the ins and outs with ease, and the quintessential 90s experiences–losing all of my work due to not saving properly on a floppy disk and waiting for three hours to get a one-hour slot in the computer lab–did not faze me.

I enjoyed working with computers, once I learned that as long as I typed in the right set of directions, the computer would not ever let me down. I also found comfort in the knowledge that computers are very forgiving. You usually can find a way to restore that lost data, and of course, there’s the revered ‘undo’ function. Heading into the early 2000s, I learned new computer tips and tricks with ease, and settled into the role of trailblazer among my teaching peers, for example, troubleshooting their brave attempts at the daunting tasks of writing lesson plans in MS Word and using district email.

My serious relationship with Google Sheets began in 2011, when I accepted a position as Middle School Technology Teacher. Over the course of five years, I was tasked with fleshing out the following curricula: Website and Blog Design, TV Production, Introduction to CAD, LEGO Physics, and Creative Computing. Since I was only given a few paper documents–no curriculum resources, other than a computer lab with about 20 stations (not enough for each student), a couple of iPads, some quirky cameras, and a few boxes of LEGO kits, I was steered in the direction of hybrid teaching. I taught myself how to use many computer and web tools to make the courses work, tools such as Windows Live Movie Maker, Trimble SketchUp, Edmodo, Weebly, Wix, Screencast-O-Matic, Scratch, App Inventor, and many, many, many more.

I learned all about Google Apps for Education, and I used my teacher Google account to develop a class Google Site, where students could go to read lectures and submit homework. We started out using Edmodo as an online learning platform, but shifted to Google Classroom once it was released in 2014. My magnum opus was what I called my teacher motherboard, a very special Google Sheet that I used to keep track of the progress of my 800 students per school year in one location, and to deploy their syllabuses and due dates.

Through my own research, I learned how to embed portions of the spreadsheet into my class website pages. So, for example, the sixth grade LEGO Physics students could only see their own curriculum resources and due dates on their designated web page. This way, I could update all of the webpages from the motherboard, rather than going to the Google Site and having to update page by page. Embedding the motherboard spreadsheet also solved the numerous formatting issues I had experienced on the Google Site doing it the old way.

Two other memorable Google Sheets “apps” that I invented during that time were my assignment and cumulative grade calculators. These “apps” helped my students to be more active in their own learning, and saved me a lot of precious time. I would have each student use the assignment grade calculator to self-evaluate their own work, then I’d go in and verify the grades they gave themselves and add my initials in a different color.

Always the Inventor

I still use Google Sheets, to this day, to document the progress and schedules of my first graders. We use a Google Sheet embedded within a Google Slide to display our weekly class job chart. Speaking of Google Slides, it ranks in second place for me as an inventor’s tool. I have used Google Slides to deliver every technology class lecture and to create several kid-friendly “class websites” by simply throwing together cool background colors and fonts, and linked shapes, sending my students directly to where they need to go in a clear and concise manner. Currently, we keep track of our school days using an interactive calendar that I made using Google Slides, which allows us to remove virtual sticky notes to reveal the next day on an image of the monthly calendar. It also allows us to type messages concerning the day, date, season, and weather, and any other relevant messages.

My love for Google Sheets has predictably trickled into my personal life as well. I developed a budget journal and calculator, which I have used for many years–especially to keep track of the oh-so-challenging Teacher Summer Budget. Some of my family members use it as well! A few years ago, I created a phone “app”, using a Google Form with a Google Sheet output, to keep track of my house hunting. I opened the form on my phone’s web browser, and then saved the website to my desktop, creating an app effect. Each time I visited a property, I would take out my phone, open up my “app” and fill out information on the Google form about: the neighborhood, condition, room sizes, curb appeal, etc. Later, I could go to the Google Sheet to compare and contrast all of the properties that I had visited. Whenever I need to calculate or keep track of data, I open up a Google Sheet and get to work. Sometimes, this results in a cool new invention!

The future of Teacher to Techie

If you read this entire post, you are a trouper–thank you! It was important for me to set the background of my story by introducing myself as an inventor. My next post will probably be just as long as I catch up on all that I have been doing in the last two months. I have become progressively more engaged in learning and practicing coding. It’s all happening so quickly that I’m starting to forget some of the details of my journey, which is why I decided to start blogging. Here are some additional topics I am planning to blog about:

  • Impactful Courses, Podcasts, YouTube Channels
  • Essential Principles for an Aspiring Software Engineer
  • Recognizing and Overcoming Imposter Syndrome
  • Why I Want to Retire from Teaching and Work Full Time in Tech

Stay tuned. . .

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