Split composition showing a manhole cover: left side shows pedestrians walking past on a city street; right side reveals close-up intricate decorative details including gears, laurel wreaths, and the date 1923

I have talked before about my love of podcasts and the app I use to listen to them. I highly suggest you listen to podcasts and use Overcast to listen to them.

One of the podcasts you should subscribe to is 99% Invisible. A new episode of 99PI is one of my favorite events of the week! The production quality sets the bar by which I judge all other podcasts (most are found wanting), and the stories they tell are compelling. Every episode is a no regret, automatic listen. You can listen to one of my favorite recent episodes below:

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Three educators collaborating around a table covered with notebooks, sketches, and sticky notes in a bright office with bookshelves and a whiteboard, actively discussing and planning together

This post tells the origin story of the custom teacher planner that I make every year for the teachers and staff at my school.

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As a teacher, it’s very easy to get wrapped up in your own classroom. That is why we get into the job after all. But after a few years of working hard to create more automated systems in my classroom and creating evergreen high-level materials that can be reused from year-to-year, I started looking more closely at the hallways around my school.

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So I want to take just a few minutes to quickly recap how a website works. This is not meant to be insulting, but I find that this is a hang-up when I present at conferences about my gamified class so please bear with me. If you are good to go, then go back to my gamification overview and pick a different post to read.

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Laptop, external hard drive, and cloud storage icon connected by glowing data streams with file icons flowing between them, illustrating multi-location backup redundancy

If you have a computer, you have a ticking time bomb. Some computers last decades before they have a catastrophic failure, some barely make their way out of the box. Whichever is the case, your computer will eventually fail and you will lose all of the data on that device. This outcome is guaranteed no matter who makes the computer, only the timeline is unknown. This means that you must prepare. 

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