I offer a variety of workshops, sessions, and keynotes. Each presentation is designed to be extremely up-to-date, practical, and tailored to meet the audience's needs. Read more about my presentations and workshops.
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Teachers of all grade levels can sweeten their lessons with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI). A growing number of websites offer teachers AI-powered tools for lesson planning, differentiating, communicating, and assessing. AI is an exceptional brainstorming partner, and, when combined with a teacher's expertise, can produce delightful content, engaging activities, and instructional resources. We'll explore free tools for crafting clever learning activities, developing thoughtful questions, authoring relevant story problems, reinforcing vocabulary, and generating rubrics. While the intelligence may be artificial, the results are real.
The recipe for an appetizing lesson includes hooking students right from the start. Discover a variety of simple ways to make any lesson extra special by focusing on a well-crafted hook. Great hooks connect background knowledge to the topic, build anticipation, and ignite curiosity. Tony shares low-prep hooks, including redacted text, mystery pictures, custom Mad Libs, and other creative ways to add flavor to the first bite of any lesson!
Conversation is crucial for promoting critical thinking, deepening understanding, gaining perspective, and fostering a sense of community. In this presentation, Tony shares flavorful ways to stir up dialogue and discussion about any topic. Experience how teachers can review the content of a YouTube video, use templates that facilitate peer feedback, spin wheels to spice up vocabulary practice, and ignite deep dialogue with slow reveal graphs. With a combination of delicious discussion prompts and tech tools, you'll leave with recipes for success that can help you engage all students in meaningful conversations.
Wrapping a up a lesson in a satisfying way can leave a lasting impression. Tony shares quick activities that can be used to check for understanding or emphasize key information at the conclusion of a lesson. Get your hands on grab-and-go exit tickets, question wheels, self-assessment prompts, and reflection templates—all finishing touches teachers can serve as a lesson's dessert . We don't always leave room for desert, but after this presentation, you'll be motivated to end your lessons just as strongly as you started them.
Steal the show when you make visually stunning videos with Canva for Education! Whether starting with a template or from scratch, you might be surprised at what teachers and students can create. Learn how to trim out mistakes, zoom to focus attention, add picture-in-picture, insert sound effects, cut to compelling visuals, and end music at just the right moment. Tie it all together with animations, and find out ways to share your movie masterpieces.
Canva is a versatile design tool that simplifies the process of creating documents. Often Canva creations remain digital and never leave a computer screen. However, there’s something majestic about being able to create, touch, and share printed productions. These kinds of creations can be dreamy for teachers to get instructional materials into the hands of students. They can also be an enchanting way for students to share and show learning. Let’s explore swoon-worthy templates for making stickers, zines, door hangers, dice, envelopes, and other tangible products.
Students and teachers can tell stories, define vocabulary, explain phenomena, demonstrate math problems, and so much more through stop motion animations. These kinds of animations can be created by making incremental changes between slides and playing them back quickly. The slides can have images, shapes, and text, and Tony has some tricks up his sleeve for making the animations extra awesome. After seeing how to create animations frame-by-frame, learn how to share as self-playing links, videos, and animated GIFs.
Make your documents, presentations, and graphics stand out. Word art in Google Slides can be styled in many creative ways. Combining fonts, fills, borders, shadows, and layers can make for eye-popping titles and text. Word art creations can be saved as images and used anywhere you want to grab attention.
Get schooled on emojis! Emojis aren’t just cute cartoons you can type. They are now a part of the fabric of modern society. Let’s explore the history of emojis, what they mean, and how they affect communication. You should know that emojis are not confined to smartphones and tablets; their charm can be put into action on mobile devices and computers. Tony Vincent is ready to demonstrate how emojis can inspire learning and creativity. He is somewhat obsessed with emojis and has dozens of clever ideas that any teacher can use. His innovative suggestions include illustrating ideas, offering feedback, reinforcing vocabulary, presenting math problems, kickstarting the writing process, and assessing learning.
Google Sites is an incredible way for teachers and students to build and publish websites. Let's examine example sites so that you can get ideas for adding function and flair to your own home page. You'll see stylish headers, animated buttons, various layouts, custom graphics, dynamic media, and other ways to make a website extra attractive.
Google Forms is awesome, but you already knew that. It’s great how responses feed directly into a spreadsheet for easy access and analysis. You can create assessments, surveys, checkout forms, and quizzes for students. You can also poll colleagues, collect information from parents, and keep logs. If you dig into the settings, you can do even more! Let’s take a look at things like limiting response length, pre-filling responses, tweaking confirmation messages, locking a form with a passcode, and authoring interactive stories. Let’s also explore add-ons that can send email notifications, turn off a form automatically, randomly pick names, and more.
In an effort to help learners grow their digital drawing skills, Tony Vincent came up with a series of challenges called Shapegrams. Shapegrams are nicely packaged inside Google Drawings and Google Slides documents and contain pictures to recreate, space to draw, video tutorials, drawing hints, and side activities. The collection of guided exercises invites purposeful practice and creative exploration.
It turns out that Shapegrams are a great activity that students in Grade 2 and up can do independently, making them perfect for online and blended learning. Get a tour of Shapegrams, tips for integrating into the flow of your class, and ideas for putting students' drawing skills to good use. Go behind the scenes and explore how to deliver lessons through Google Drawings and Google Slides.
Turn a potentially boring lesson into a brilliant one! Make learning irresistible by hooking your students' senses, connecting to background knowledge, making predictions, and building mysteries. Experience pixelated pictures, redacted text, research scrambles, locked content, customized Mad Libs, mystery maps, emoji messages, and other inviting ways to captivate learners.
Tony's most popular presentation is updated with all new ways to make learning irresistible. Experience Tony's new favorite lesson hooks, conversation starters, and tools to make any lesson extra special.
Get ready for rapid-fire tips for all kinds of tech: YouTube, iPhone, iPad, Google apps, PowerPoint, emojis, keyboard shortcuts, Chrome, Windows, Mac, and more. The tips are inconspicuous. You'll feel like you're learning insider information—information that will improve your life.
Meet up with Tony Vincent to learn about making instructional videos! Making your own videos is an opportunity to authentically reach your students. Tony has produced hundreds of instructional videos, and he shares examples, advice, ideas, techniques, and tools for creating your own videos. You can apply this information to videos you might make for distance learning, blended learning, or differentiated instruction.
Discover effective visual design techniques that you can apply to a variety of printable creations. These creations are not ordinary printouts! Learn to make tear-off sheets, table toppers, bookmarks, multipage posters, door hangers, brochures, dice, scratch cards, and foldable mini-books. These kinds of productions can be a great for teachers to package instructional materials and to connect online learning with the physical learning environment. Furthermore, the printable examples we explore can be made by students. There are lots of possibilities to explore when we turn our digital designs into tangible products.
Tony Vincent didn’t want his class to be known as Mr. Vincent’s Fifth Grade. Rather than making himself the mascot, he co-developed a class identity with his students. His 2018-2019 class named themselves Pixel Paws. Tony notes that when students rally around an authentic brand, they feel a strong sense of community, work harder, and achieve more. See the brand in action, understand how it was developed, and consider how you might give your class, club, or team a unique identity.
YouTube is full of awesome videos, but you already knew that. You might not know about some of YouTube’s settings and features that can make it even more awesome for teaching and learning. Learn about options for curating playlists, refining searches, stripping away distractions, using keyboard shortcuts, including time links, blurring faces, searching transcripts, and customizing thumbnails. Also, see compelling ways to make watching a video an active experience for students—whether you upload your own video or use someone else’s.
Bring content to life through animation! You probably know how to find exciting animated GIFs online, but how about creating your own? Teachers and students can create animated GIFs to grab attention, illustrate ideas, break down a process into steps, show a sequence, and make content memorable. Learn how to create your own animated GIFs about any subject with free online tools, including with Google Slides.
Learning academic terms and phrases doesn’t have to be boring. In fact, learning new words should be exciting and fun! It’s time to start looking at digital ways to expand students’ vocabulary. Let’s explore apps and websites that are so irresistible, students can’t help but be motivated to learn. We’ll take a good look at representing words visually, creating multimedia, and playing games. Yes, the technology can be mesmerizing, but it’s important to use techniques and strategies proven to work. That’s why pairing technology with Robert Marzano’s Six Steps for Vocabulary Instruction is a powerful combination.
Nowadays students have a variety of ways to show what they know and to express themselves. Let’s take a look at some of the hottest websites and apps for showing, explaining, and retelling. In fact, these tools can turn students into teachers and are great for sharing their answers to project-based driving questions. Tony Vincent shares examples and demonstrations of apps for making audio recordings, editing movies, creating comics, recording digital puppet shows, narrating drawings, crafting digital books, and more. You’ll also learn about ways to assess projects and the importance of reflection. This presentation is great for those already familiar with project based learning (PBL).
Some of the best learning projects set out to make a dent in the universe. That dent might be big or small, but knowing their projects are making a difference in the world is great motivation for students to push themselves toward deeper learning. Tony Vincent is ready to share important ideas for making student projects powerful, which include making a difference, encouraging student ownership, and having an authentic audience.
Did you know you can print on sticky notes using your computer’s printer? It’s true! And, you can design your own customized sticky notes in an online app you already know how to use: Google Slides! Examine loads of examples of educator-designed sticky notes, and see demonstrations of design techniques to make your notes look absolutely awesome when printed.
Not only do projects motivate students because they can be an authentic use of technology, they also facilitate active learning, critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity. In this session Tony Vincent showcases several inspiring projects. Each project begins with a driving question—an open-ended question that focuses the project by creating interest and curiosity.
Writing effective driving questions is surprisingly challenging. You want the question to be irresistible to students, which means it cannot sound like a test question. Tony Vincent gives strategies for refining driving questions that lead to student-focused inquiry. The group will write and share some of their ideas for driving questions.
There are six principles of sticky ideas according to Dan and Chip Heath, authors of Made to Stick. Sticky ideas are ones that we can plainly understand, clearly remember, and easily retell. When teachers and students make educational media, whether visual, audio or video, we want them to be sticky. Let's look at examples so we can make our own (and our students') ideas stick.
Google Drawings is great for designing graphics, and it’s also a handy interactive whiteboard. Teachers are using this whiteboard in clever ways, and Tony Vincent has collected dozens of ideas. The kinds of activities include: fill-in, arranging, sorting, labeling, meme creation, and math manipulatives. Some activities are ones you’ll want to copy, modify, and give to your students. Others might serve as inspiration for making your own from scratch.
Collecting digital badges and stickers is surprisingly motivating. They can serve as recognition for achievements, acknowledgement of specific skills, and feedback on social behaviors. Each badge in a learner collection can be an artifact that helps monitor progress and celebrate growth. Badges and stickers are typically image files with transparent backgrounds, and they are often colorful and whimsical . Discover where to find ready-made images, and learn how to create your own stylish and personalized stickers in Google Slides.
Teachers and students can do amazing things with Google Slides! Let’s take a look at how to use this great app app to be creative and to collaborate! You’ll get to take part in making a digital booklet and fashioning an interactive digital poster. That’s in addition to seeing an array of fantastic ways of putting Slides to good use. Inventive ideas include publishing collaborative alphabet books, building animations, constructing timelines, creating infographics, publishing newsletters, and making narrated presentations.
There are lots of reasons to give students brain breaks. Quick pauses in learning relieve stress, reduce cognitive overload, break up monotony, and strengthen social bonds. Short mental recesses allow students to reboot so they can refocus. Let’s explore strategic intermissions that include interactive websites, satisfying videos, and zippy activities that bring about joy, connection, and curiosity.