How I Spent My Winter Snow-cation

During the "first" Atlanta Snow Event (January 28 - 31), I was in Orlando, FL attending the amazing FETC conference learning about technology in education. It makes sense, then, that during this most recent Snow-cation (February 12 - 14) I would again spend time learning about and playing with technology in education!

1)  I participated in the first ever ISTE Virtual Conference where I attended one session online (with Jane Krauss and Suzie Boss about Project Based Learning) and heard the keynote address from Adam Bellow. During the online session, I participated in discussion and learned about new resources in the form of a Blog, books and online sites all dedicated to PBL! I learned about Inquiry by Design and core routines of Visible Thinking. Excellent stuff! ( I had a bad head cold and couldn't stay awake [darn Pacific Time!] for the last session.)

2)  I subscribed to five iTunes U courses:

• Classroom 2.0 Live!
• Google Tools
• iPad for Teachers 101
• iVCS Middle School
• Tech-Ed iPad Edition for Teachers

3) From these courses, I watched four videos about iPads and learned a few new tricks with:

• Basics
• Mail
• Safari
• iCloud

4) I watched a video on Classroom 2.0 Live! featuring Todd Nesloney about Project Based Learning.
I learned about a new online resource, Sophia, which is similar to Edmodo. I'll be exploring that this weekend!

5) I started reading some of the links from folks I follow on Twitter - amazing stuff - about flipped classrooms and iPad use and iPad Apps.

6) Most importantly, I changed my thinking about the oft heard phrase, "Just Google it." As a Teacher - Librarian (School Library Media Specialist), I have worked hard to teach students NOT to turn to Google as a research starting point. I am willing to modify my belief in regard to educators, based on a (paraphrased quote) from Todd Nesloney:

 "We live in a world of Google. If you are (an educator) and you are choosing NOT to use the brilliant technology available to you in the Information Age, then you are choosing to be defiant and ignorant. Don't know how to do something? Just google it! Google allows for professional development 24/7. If you don't know what a hashtag is, google What is a hashtag? and I guarantee you will find an answer."

Google Apps Admin Console Best Practices for Schools

I didn't even know what Google Apps Admin Console was before attending this brief introduction at the Google booth on the Expo floor. The instructor talked about key admin apps focus areas: the Organizational Units Structure (how to separate students and staff and aggregate students by class or school; Services available for business and schools; Administrative privileges - who has these and how do they use them?; Domain settings; core services; security and compliance; reporting.

All of this was a bit over my head, but it made me think about these questions for administrators when it comes to a system or school technology initiative:

What technology are we using and supporting?
Who is using this? What different levels of "user" do we have? (Admin, staff, student)
What services are available to users?
Who is designated administrator? What responsibilities and roles does the administrative user have?
What are the core services of this technology?
What type of security do we have and how is it monitored?
What types of reports can we generate about or with this technology?

I feel like we need to think

Keynote Address: Danny Forster of "Build it Bigger," Discovery Education

Various FETC chair people and Orange County, Florida officials welcomed us to FETC. This conference is held every year at the Orange County Convention Center and has grown from a local Florida conference to a conference of international reputation (attendees came from all 50 states and 41 countries outside the USA).  As the Commissioner of Orange County said, "Innovation radiates at FETC!"

Danny Forster of "Build It Bigger" gave an excellent keynote address about getting beyond facts and into concepts, going beneath the project and into the context. He studied art and architecture in college, and superbly blended storytelling with questioning - modeling creative thinking. He advocates STEM, technology, critical thinking and reasoning as necessary skills for our students.

I hope to watch some episodes of Build It Bigger after hearing him speak. He went beyond the facts of architecture and into the "why" of art and design. Watching him talk about bridges, buildings, and columns had me captivated, learning science, math and history while fully engaged in his tales.

Session for first time FETC attendees

This was a great introduction to FETC! The presenters explained how the FETC App worked, how our scan-able name tags worked, how we could use a QR reader to scan signs and information, how the attendance verification software, VerAttend, works (My name tag was scanned outside every session. I will receive an email with information regarding the sessions I attended.)

They gave us pointers about coffee breaks (how to get the coveted conference coffee mug!), poster sessions, learning lab sessions, and how to maximize our time in break out sessions. Every session has an Edmodo group that any conference attendee can join (whether one attended that session or not) and all evaluations were being done through Edmodo.

This was a quick and fun way to learn more about the conference.

TechShare LIVE! Keynote

After finalizing my registration on Wednesday morning, I went to the Early Keynote, TechShare LIVE! featuring Adam Bellow, Hall Davidson, Leslie Fisher and Kathy Schrock.  Each person had 15 minutes to share some of the newest technology with the audience. This was like being in a candy store, seeing all the awesome technology/
candy, and then leaving with ideas about what kind of candy I'd like, but leaving without any.  Here's my takeaway:

Adam Bellow:

He showed Apps and cool gadgets.

Knock to Unlock - $3.99 App that you can use instead of passwords
One Cable to Rule them All - $17.95 id America
Culcharge - a power keychaain
wearable technology:
 - Google Glass - a wearable smart camera and more
 - Smart Gloves, with a Bluetooth headphone in them.
 - Pivothead smart - Sunglasses with a camera, wifi, etc...
 - Metapro - glasses that let you look through your entire field of vision.
 - Structure - grab 3-D space around the room, scan things in space. Interact in real life

Circuit Scribe - a pen with conductive ink for drawing useable circuit boards and simple machines.
KANO - build a computer/ write code
Digital credit cards - put all of your credit cards, gift cards and loyalty cards and put them on one card.

Hall Davidson:
Create a book from your tweets - twournal.com/ tweetbooks.com

Apps with eyes - Tap Tap See. A camera for the blind/ visually impaired. Take a photo. The accessibly enabled voice over will tell you what it is.
Cardiio - an App for monitoring heart rate without a thermometer (uses digital imaging.)
How to unsend a Gmail.

Leslie Fisher:
She showed many items that are not yet on the market!

Picture Time - looks like a lens. Is an entire camera
Serveball - a camera in a throwable ball
Motrr Galileo - create a 360 panorama
3D doodler - a pen that extrudes rubberized ink
Catch Box - a nerf based throwable microphone
MYO - wearable band. Use hand motions to control screen/ functions
Socket -  a soccer ball that generates power for charging devices. Comes with a light source.
Holiday - 7 meters of holiday lights. 16 million different color combinations. Control with a Smart phone

Kathy Schrock:
Hue - personal wireless lighting
Nomadbrush - a paint stylus
Porkfolio - an app enabled piggy bank
Tellagami - create an avatar with 30 second voice record
Quixey - iPad search engine (find apps)
Bookmarklet - creates a printable storyboard for YouTube videos
Tapforms Database - save passwords
tagboard.com - search hashtags

Pre-Confernce Workshop at FETC

Well, I missed the snow and the subsequent shut down of Atlanta, but I did experience a four-day flurry of information! (Sorry, couldn't help myself.)  On Tuesday, I attended a hands-on, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) workshop with Kathy Schrock. I first heard of Kathy Schrock when I was getting my first Master's Degree at Georgia State University in the mid-90s! She one of the country's first school librarian's to create an interactive Library Website, for which she won many accolades and much attention from colleges training school librarians.

I attended a three-hour workshop, Creating with the iPad. We used Bloom's Revised Taxonomy to design, construct, produce and create projects using Apps for iPads.

In a whirlwind, the Apps which we learned about and / or used included:

 Ask3
Audioboo
Baiboard
Educreations
Graphio Lite
Haiku Deck
HokusaiIdea Sketch
Inkflow Free
Instashare
MagicPlan
MindMash
Montaj
Pic Collage
Pixntell
Popplet Lite
ScreenChomp
ShowMe IWB
Sock Puppets
T-Charts
Tellagami
Videolicious
Vimeo
Vittle Free
Xsync

I will be sharing these with teachers and hopefully we'll start seeing student creations soon!

On the Expo Floor

Let's face it, everybody likes free stuff. Going to an Expo is a great place to get free stuff. I scored pens and pencils, candy, post-it notes, some toy like items, and a few coveted t-shirts!!

In full disclosure, I must admit that I visited a few booths only to see if I could get a t-shirt. One such booth was the Houghlin-Mifflin Textbook booth. They had awesome looking t-shirts. The booth was set up in small presentation style, hinting that one would have to listen to some boring fascinating presentation to "earn" the t-shirt. I decided it was worth it, even if it meant hearing about textbook publishing, so I sat down. Much to my surprise, they had a guest speaker, Erik Palmer, who spoke about the importance of teaching and learning "speaking." Check out his website, pvlegs.com

(In addition to hearing a great presentation, learning about a website to use, and having the opportunity to win an autographed book, I did walk away with a great t-shirt!)