Friday, February 15, 2013

METC 2013


I was very excited to get to the METC conference. I was looking forward to one session in particular…”Visual Storytelling” that was at 1:00. However, I didn’t make it because I had a sick kid at school. Ugh!!! By the way, it has spread in our house and it has not been pretty these last few days L

Once I arrived and picked up my facilitator packets I was ready to get started. Prior to attending my first session, I walked around at viewed the booths that were set up. For me, the most interesting was the Mackin Booth. This couldn’t possibly be because I’m a librarian at heart J The first session I attended was “Planning & Implementing a BYOD: Panel Discussion”. The session was hosted by Mariano Marin-Gomez from Lindberg School District, Jason Rooks, and Tom Swoboda, both from Parkway School District. There were approximately 35-50 people in the class and most of them were technicians of their district. There were a few administrators and teachers as well. I think the main purpose of this session was discussing transitions from a building centric tech to a student centric tech. They also discussed the “BYOD (bring your own device)” and how it has encouraged students. I think that just like every other district the technological access used to be from “somewhere” to now being “everywhere”. Initially before these districts started the “BYOD” parents/teachers were worried that it would distract students from their everyday learning. However, data has shown it to be beneficial in students’ learning. I also learned about the four step foundational concept; (1) Professional Development, (2) Infrastructure, (3) Educational Purpose, and (4) Community Involvement. We could not have a sound foundation without these four components. I do have to say that I was somewhat lost in the mix of some ideas they were discussing. Because so many others were techs, Tom Swoboda discussed a lot of infrastructure and wiring. It was confusing for me but I know it made perfect sense to most who attended. I liked one idea they used in classrooms to let students know if the technological device could be used that particular day. They used a stop light. If it was on red when the students entered the room, devices could not be out or used. If it was on yellow, the students could use when teacher felt it was necessary. If it was on green, they knew they could have devices out and ready to use. I enjoyed the session and the information it provided. I have viewed a few sites they discussed and really liked them so I thought I would share.



www.polleverwhere.com – Student surveys

www.socrative.com – Student Assessments

The second session I attended was also very informative. It was “Experience the 21st Century Co-Learning & Co-Teaching Classroom presented by Basiyr Rodney and Roy Tamashiro from Webster University. This was designed around ISTE NETS creative thinking, collaborative learning, and authentic (real-world app). Their focus points were to solve, think, and inform using technology. They also showed a lot of word clouds and how to inquire and create things together in the classroom. A site we used in the session was called tinyurl.com/metc21co. It was a neat site that used word clouds to help brainstorm information. The cool thing about this was that you could then click on one of the words provided it would bring up pictures or definitions. It has a built in thesaurus. It also allows you to pull pictures off and use them for topic. From the information I gathered, this type of information is for brainstorming with the class and then having them have a variety of topics to choose from. This would be a great tool to use in the classroom and to keep students involved. Another tool they discussed was Taxido (another word cloud). One main idea that I pulled away from this session was that we want to go beyond our regular teaching approaches but we want to make sure that it’s not too far off from our curriculum. I really enjoyed this session and received some valuable information from it was well.



 

 

3 comments:

  1. I use the word cloud site tagxedo.com. Great word cloud site to create shapes or put clouds into a word. My kids in Tech Comm have a lot of fun with it.

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  2. I like the idea of the "stoplight" for nonverbal rules about technology usage! While not necessarily a tech only strategy, I am always looking for classroom management tools like that.

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    1. Yes, I thought this was a good idea as well. We think about this type of stuff for elementary kiddos but not necessarily for middle or high school.

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