Once again I am going to try to get back in the act of blogging. This time I am going to change my focus a bit. I am currently going through my Master's Program for Academic Leadership and Principal's Certification at UTEP, and I will start adding my thought periodically as I go through the program. Additionally, I will add content related to technology and technology learning as I run across it and find it useful or fascinating.
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This years TCEA was a great event as always. I enjoyed going and presenting and came back with quite a few ideas. The big topics of this convention seemed to be maker spaces and the maker movement, BreakoutEDU and Escape Rooms, and augmented and virtual reality. Clay and my presentation combining augmented reality and ideas from BreakoutEDU fit right in, and our session on using Office Mix helped fill in the small amount of Microsoft-centric training available. Clay and I did some brain storming on maker spaces and coding and making those ideas more relevant to the content areas. I think there are some great possibilities in taking those ideas and instead of treating them as extras, pulling them in and using them as a medium in which to teach the content area goals. I think they could be used for great PBL ideas.
I am here at El Paso High School to do a training, and it is an optional training. Unfortunately I have not had anyone show up today. I completely understand that time is precious to teachers, and that if given the choice they will take care of more immediate needs for their classes. I have to admit I would probably do the same thing. I need to consider doing more to make my training more attractive and seem more critical to their needs. I believe that a portion of that might be to create some kind of teaser information for my training sessions, but also provide the training in more mediums. This has been discussed in my department for years. I have known that it was the case but I have not focused on making that change. Sitting here makes me more aware of the need.
It's been a while since my last entry, but I'm back for an update. I have been having a blast this summer providing several training sessions for teachers, including Flip it (flipped classroom training), quizlet, google forms, 21st century writing, digital storytelling with the ipad, popplet, screencast-o-matic, and the road to BYOD. It's been fantastic working with all of these great teachers. I plan to work at adding to my blog more often. Today was the iPad camp at TCEA. Karen, Clay and I all had presentations for the camp.
The opening keynote was interesting it was a panel of students and audience participants that shared some of their favorite apps, and how they were using iPads in their schools. The app that surprised me the most was the Adobe Reader app, both students listed it as one of their favorites for completing what would be paper assignments on the iPad and then sending them back to their teachers. My session was the first one up of our teams presentations, I presenting using Digital Scavenger Hunts with an iPad and I received quite a bit of positive feedback. It seems that they liked the strategy and I had provided example for the PK - K level as well as all the way up to high school. So I think they saw the relevance at all levels. Next up was Karen's iPad-tastic Vocabulary. I had not seen her present this before and I really liked her workstation plan and the multiple ways she had the students engage with the vocabulary word. This strategy is again one that I think can be scaled up to any grade level. In the session where I helped with her back channel she covered using Educreations and Popplet Lite as tools for the students to collect their examples of their vocabulary word and present them back. Great examples. We then hurried over to help Clay with his Popplet Lite session. Clay showed all of the ins and out of using Popplet Lite, how to add multiple different kinds of content, and also that there is an online version that students can use that has additional features such as collaboration, and adding video. I then headed back to the main ballroom to help out with their Tech Slam event. They had different people come up and share an app or a tip for using iPads. I shared the Morfo app for creating quick (less than 30 second) videos from the point of view of particular characters. Some of the apps that I would like to take a closer look at were, Documents by Readdle, Slideshark, Appolearning, Math Duel, and Youtube Capture. TCEA 2014 starts today. We arrived and got registered and found out that there were some premium sessions still open for today. After a quick lunch at the Iron Works BBQ we headed off to check out some sessions.
Clay and I attended 24/7 Evernote: Remember Everything. I am already an Evernote user and I after reading the description of the session I was concerned that I would not hear anything that I didn't already know. But I was pleasantly surprised, I picked up a few new tips about Evernote and I am now an even bigger fan of their product. 1. First new thing for me was encrypting text. I was aware that you could share your Evernote notes with others. However I did not know that you can hide some of the text from them. For example you are introduce to a new web tool, you take notes and set up an account and while you are at it you jot down in Evernote your username and password. When you decide you would like to share this with your colleagues, rather than cutting and pasting it into an email, or deleting your username and password and possibly forgetting them, you select a portion of the text and right click and choose encrypt. You create a password for the text to unencrypt it for you, but the other people you share it with cannot read the encrypted part. 2. Evernote does OCR. This was the coolest part to me. When you take a picture of a document with Evernote, the image is processed and converted into searchable text. It doesn't happen immediately it takes a little time, but it then is a searchable document. This is great for a lot of uses. Student can take pictures of things written on the chalkboard/whiteboard/overhead and then search them later. Take a picture of there notes and use then copy and paste to use them elsewhere. Awesome stuff. 3. Cool new response tool was shared with us as well. Kahoot! (getkahoot.com) seems like it might be an interesting variant on something like infuse learning, worth checking out in more detail. |
AuthorI am a Instructional Technology Specialist in El Paso ISD. I help teachers with adding technology into their lessons. I have been with the district for 15 years. My goal is to help teachers become comfortable with the process of technology integration, so that they are able to integrate their own lessons with ease. Archives
April 2018
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