Tag Archive for: K12-Education

I’m Presenting at Macstock!

Mike, a man with glasses and a beard wearing a black shirt, smiles at the camera against a blurred green outdoor background. To his left is the Macstock 9 logo featuring peace, heart, and computer icons, with text announcing "I'm presenting at Macstock!" on a blue background.

I am excited to be giving my first conference presentation since 2017 at the Macstock Conference and Expo next month!

The workshop will help attendees create automated systems for their creative projects: both purposeful folder structures and project management workflows that actually get the work done.

I was interviewed on the MacVoices podcast, which you can check out here to get some more details.

If you are coming to the conference, let me know! If flying to Chicago is not in the cards, you can also sign up for a digital ticket and get recordings of all of the workshops. Consider using my code MIKEBURKE50 when you register, I’d appreciate it!

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Using Narrative Structure to Improve Corporate Training

Gandalf the Grey from The Lord of the Rings stands on a stone path in the lush green hills of the Shire. Wearing his iconic pointed wizard hat and gray robes, he holds his wooden staff while overlooking the idyllic countryside. Sunlight breaks through clouds in the background, illuminating the pastoral landscape of rolling hills and distant fields that stretches toward the horizon. The scene captures Gandalf as the wise mentor figure at the beginning of the hero's journey.

The human brain sitting in your skull today didn’t evolve to process bullet points and data tables. It descended from ancestors who survived the harshest conditions on Earth without a single written manual. They passed critical knowledge from generation to generation through stories around fires, tales of where to find food, which plants could heal, and how to avoid danger.

As I often told my high school students: “The perfect brain for PowerPoint died in the Ice Age.”

Our neural architecture is wired for narrative. It’s why people will sit through a three-hour Marvel movie with a full bladder but struggle to stay awake through a ten-minute slide presentation. It’s why every major religious text consists primarily of stories rather than bulleted lists of commandments. And it’s why the most durable pieces of human knowledge are ancient tales that have survived millennia.

Yet somehow, when we design corporate training, we often ignore this fundamental truth about how humans learn.

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Trello Welcome Board

Four high school students collaborating around a table in a science classroom, each working on tablets with protective cases, with Biology, Chemistry, and Physics posters visible on the walls and additional students working at tables in the background

Since I was a kid, the start of the school year has always been a sour point in my year, not because that meant Summer was over, but because the tedium of Welcome activities was fast approaching. In this post I share my process and product for making the first day of school a little more bearable.

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Clips for iOS

Producing and using your own videos in your classroom is as powerful as a cheat code. However it can take too much time to do this well, unless you use Clips for iOS.

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Quizlet

A split composition comparing traditional and digital study methods: messy stacks of handwritten paper flashcards on the left versus organized, glowing holographic data blocks on the right.

“Memorization” is not a dirty word in education. However, it should be technology (not teachers) helping students memorize facts. Honestly, Quizlet is probably better at it anyway. Read this post to find out why you should be using Quizlet in your classes and how I have implemented Quizlet in mine over the past 3 years.

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