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!)

Thursday at FETC

The morning started at 7:30 with an Early Bird Keynote speech by Google Evangelist, Jaime Casap. He talked about how learning is personal: what a student thinks and how he or she thinks about things is important. Personalizing education is important.

Technology is wrapped around our lives. He asked for a show of hands of who had used technology already? Almost all hands went up. If it is important in our lives, it is much more so in the lives of our students. We must capitalize on this!

Are our students reaching their full potential, or are we (teachers) getting in the way of this? Simply expecting the same achievement of each child may limit many of our students from going beyond what our expectations or requirements are.

He was an amazing speaker. Look him up on YouTube, or better yet, see him live in person sometime. You'll be glad you did.

Photos!

Waiting for the Technology Keynote Session Wednesday, at 11:00. 

A video I created using Tellegami, a presentation App using an Avatar!

FETC 2014

I am attending the Florida Educational Technology Conference (FETC) for the first time. It is a national conference (although 41 countries are represented!) and the first technology conference in the US for the calendar year.

Yesterday I attended a pre-conference workshop, Creating with Apps. I learned about many new Apps and had mini-lesssons on 9 of them where I had to create and upload projects. It was awesome!

This morning was a great technology Keynote address!

Things I've learned so far:
 - how to take a screen shot on my iPhone and iPad
 - how to use a QR reader
 - how to synchronize my downloads between the iPad and my iPhone
 - I've been introduced to many new Apps (that I will have to play with)
 - how to tweet using a hashtag
 - how to create a Blog
 - how to upload the photos on my phone to Google+ and share through automatic back up on any    device I choose!
 - how to post on a Blog
 - how to upload photos on a Blog
 - how to download from a Tweet
 - how to join conference groups on Edmodo

I look forward to learning MUCH more!