#ISTE13 My Take On Day 3 (Monday, June 24)

I'm so tired...  A ton of information along with an extensive, yet strategic stroll through the ISTE Expo. However, the biggest take-away from today deals with the vital notion that education is not about the tool...it's about the child using the tool and developing a relationship with him/her and showing them how to exploit that tool to do anything he/she wishes.

My other take aways are listed below:

Session 1: 

Going Google - Oshkosh Area School District

Why Google:

*Treat internal and external devices as BYOD

Ideas For Out Transition

Start training with a few teachers and send them out to train the massess

Community survey regarding our website and Google transition

Start a blog to provide updates for staff

Button approach to links on the website

Session 2: 

Did You Know? Amazing Features of Google Apps

delivr.com/2e6zb

Great ideas to using Google applications like:

• Use Google draw for seating charts
• You can make your documents view only
• Using pre-made Google templates (Awesome!)
• Adding comments in directly in Google Docs for Language Arts or any essay or paper
• Research directly within the Google Docs
• Cite directly from site that was pulled for research within the doc
• Can modify picture tools that are ok for copyright purposes for usage rights
• Also search videos within document and embed in presentations
• Now can insert images in Google Forms
• Can also insert date and time for parent teacher conferences in forms

Check out 

• The Chrome Web Lab
• GeoGuesser ( A must)
• Voice recognition flash cards
• Peanut Gallery films
• 100,000 stars
• Cube Slam
• Webcam Swiper (uses webcam to turn the page for you of a book)
• Everynote Clearly 
• Adblock for YouTube
• Gmail Labs are great for our new email addresses for going Google!
• Google Cultural Institute (formally called Art Project) Take a White House Tour (There is a YouTube video of the camera crew going through to create the site)

Everything including all links can be accessed from the presentation embedded in the QR code above.

Session 3:

10 Killer iPad App Projects Kids Will Love

@hollydornak and @mrsjdyer

Cool Apps

• Skitch (creating fractions with pictures taken with app and annotated over)
• TurboCollage Lite (saves to photo log and then use Postino to create postcards)
• Postino (can physically mail out with real addresses or emailed)
• STickyboard (sticky notes) and Grafio Lite (Graphic Organizers): for story boarding
• Poplit (for thinking maps)
• Sock Puppet (pretty cool)
• Puppet Pals (can draw your own backgrounds and use images that are cut out as the characters: pretty cool)
• iMovie (of course)
• iMotion HD (Stop Motion)
• OSnap (Stop Motion with all the bells and whistles)
• Cute Cut (video editor)
• Educreation (video lesson creator)
• Doodle Cast (INteractive White boards) (Using this to teach lessons and have exported out for students who are absent or a way of parents learning a lesson that was taught in class. 
• pow (comic strip designer)
• scribble press (creating books)
• Little Story Maker (can have voice narration) 
• Book Creator (Create books with QR codes on pages to highlight student work. Also create books with audio for your beginner readers. Students can also create books for their research papers. Exports to everywhere including Drive, Evernote and Dropbox. COOL can even open in iBooks. Build a library of books created by students that you can even consider selling for a fundraiser. ) 
• Pocket BMX (sports reporting for games that can be done in Evernote)
• Croak.It! (recording capabilities for 30sec that builds an url that can be turned into a qr code)
• Drop Vox (syncs with dropbox account and turned into an url and qr code eventually)
• qrstuff.com (qr code generators)
• recordmp3.org (qr code generator for audio)
• FaceTime and Skype For Education (Did a virtual tour of the fire station with a fireman with an IOS device)
• Digital Wish (sends out your wish list)
• SignUp Genius (helps bring things into the classroom

Session 4:

Verizon Foundation Innovative Learning Schools

Thinkfinity.org (Professional Learning Community)

• Looking for schools who 
• transform K-12 STEM teaching and learning
• increase student engagement
• 3:1 or better 
• 40% Free/Reduce lunch

Some fun things from the day:

Rockin' Out with Pocket Guitar with @kevinhoneycutt

Watching NAO get down to Thriller 

#ISTE13 My Take On Day 2 (Sunday, June 23)

Well Day 2 consisted of meeting new people and networking to build my PLN. The greatest impact of the #ISTE13 conference is creating those relationship with educational leaders who share in the same passion to turn education up side down using technology as the mechanism. Some of the ideas I gained are listed below.

Augmented Reality with @techbradwaid using Aurasma and Daqri really cool stuff.

Google Glass demo with STEMbite's Andrew Vanden Heuval (@avheuv ) Ok, I must have a pair if not just as another toy.

The rest of the day was used discovering the SIGs (Special Interest Groups...OMG there are a ton, but all set up as advocates for special technology in education. I joined several.

The Ignite Sessions finished of the evening. Some very interesting ideas and educational trends were introduced and elaborated on including the following:

Michelle Cordy - Hacking The Classroom

Michael Mills - the digital divide: narrowing the gap. Everyone deserves access to empowerment. (Trust but verify)

@wfryer - opening digital doors using scratch to redefine geek: geek is cool. Story chasing: amplifying school stories. Journalism club to amplify happenings around school.


Jeff Piontek - STEM education. STEM to STEAM (A for arts) STREAM.

 Carrie Ross @msrossenglish technology as a gateway to what each student knows.

 Dean : silly to creativity.

 Allison White curating information overload.

Great Day 2

#ISTE13 My Take On Day 1 (Saturday, June 22)

The educational technology world converges in San Antonio, TX for June 22-26 to discuss my favorite topic, How to meet students where they are. Ok, well, maybe that’s not the exact topic, but essentially, everything discussed here will be used to enahnce or revamp the way we teach using technology while the students become the focal point of that learning.

The game-plan is to provide a synopsis of my daily adventure by highlighted useful tools that I pumped about and for sure will test out in some way in the classrooms that I have an impact on. With today being the unofficial opening of the conference, I only took advantage of one session, but it was pretty worthwhile. It was more of a meet and greet gathering for mobile device enthusiast who wanted to share ideas about effective uses of mobile applications. I took aways some nuggets that seem perfect for the mobile environment we are creating in Dallas. Here are a few:

Today's Meet (live blogging/conversation tool) (like CoverIt Live!) This tool provides an online chatroom for students to collaborate and discuss live during local events, collaborative sessions, simultaneous video viewing, etc.

Puffin (allows flash on iPad) Great for 1:1 ipad school wishing to use videos that are built with flash.

QR Rafter qr and barcode reader that also allows you to generate you own qr codes from your phone or ipad. I use QR codes often, but here are a few suggestions from the discussion: Visit website tutorials, student portfolios, website links for small kids.

iSchool Initiative (mobile deployment for students) (This is the program with the bus) I actually had a chance to sit down with this group and discuss 1:1 deployment issues and solutions that enhance success opportunities for any program. Some of the suggestions that I plan to look further into are
Air Watch; a mobile device management system (MDM). According to their site the 

AirWatch Agent provides complete mobility management for your entire fleet of iOS devices deployed across your enterprise. AirWatch provides your IT department with the ability to quickly enroll devices in your enterprise environment, configure and update device settings over-the-air, enforce security policies and compliance, secure mobile access to corporate resources, and remotely lock and wipe managed devices. 

The other is Ruckus Wireless in order to address our wifi solutions. Now, iSchool Initiative was founded by a 17 year old kid, Travis Allen (Now 20 I believe), who realized that schools needed to change their approach to teaching because he was denied the opportunity to use the tools that he knew best in a classroom setting. He believes as I do that we need to meet our students where they are and bring their technology in a learning platform. Here is the video that got him started.



Here is the current video:

I enjoyed day number 1 and I'm very excited about the days to come.