Recently I was recognized as the 2017 National Assistant Principal of the Year by NASSP. With this distinction came an opportunity to procure educational resources for Black River Middle School. For years, I wanted to find an easy to capture events and share them virtually with school stakeholders. Through my research and past experiences, I knew about the Swivl as a way to record, archive, and share video content. I was always impressed with the way it tracked movement and picked up sound clearly.  So I ultimately decided to purchase a Swivl for our school as way to capture moments, like you see below with a Holocaust survivor, that will live online for a lifetime. 

So how can a Swivl benefit your classroom, school, or district? Here are four easy ways that I can think of right off the top of my head...

1. Capture curricular moments such as a Holocaust speaker or weather assembly and post to your school website. 
2. Capture informational sessions that take place during the day or at night and push out to parents that were unable to attend. 
3. Capture student presentations or learning experiences as a way to reflect, archive, share, and assess. 
4. Capture weekly or monthly video updates for parents and students so that they can stay current with classroom, school, or district happenings. 

As you can see there many ways to make the Swivl work for your educational environment. Start out by locating a school or district that uses a Swivl and ask if you can take it for a test run. Then, at some point purchase a Swivl and try it out at a small event. Eventually, over time it will become a part of your daily routine and help enhance your transparent environment. Make sure to establish a Swivl team consisting of staff and students to help with the integration aspect. Ideally having multiple Swivls accessible for sign-out from your library will be very beneficial. The time is now to extend your role as story teller in chief and purchase a Swivl for all enjoy throughout the school year.

I recently wrote a digital playbook for Think Through Math on building a digital curriculum. You can access it by clicking on the pdf file below. Enjoy!