What I take away from San Diego... other than a sunburn of course!

Essentially, I had a blast this past week in San Diego at the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) Conference. I learned so much and cannot wait for the Fall as a result. I love the feeling I had upon returning to Seattle. I am eager for the school year to start up and I honestly think there is nothing better than being excited and in love with your job. 

I found myself feeling inspired and amazed countless times throughout the week. Surprised by the conference, yes, but the ideas, collaboration, and energy that the SAAS group brought to San Diego was the most awe-inspiring part of the entire experience.  I felt nervous at first, having heard from past ISTE goers that the experience would be overwhelming. Some warned that it was entirely likely that I would come home in a drunk-like-tech-information-overload-haze and not implement anything I learned during those 5 days. Haters truly are gonna hate, am I right? 

But despite my nerves and the exhorting words, the opposite effect occurred and the world of tech enthusiasts invited me in with glee and open robotic arms. Sure, the Expo room was shockingly enormous, the sessions were at times above my level of tech intelligence, and all jokes made at the club-like Google party were over my head, I eventually found my way. The "Newbie Crew," though missing a few key players, was in full swing. We laughed the entire time as we navigated the foreign world, negotiated sweet giveaways, swam late night in the hotel, and cracked jokes about anything and everything. We took ISTE with full force and realized at the end that the ideas/resources we will go into our second year at SAAS with are abundant and exciting. The memories of a great week together building friendships will bring a smile to my face for years to come, but the changes I am eager to implement in my classroom heavily outweigh any other benefits of the conference and trip to Cali. 

What I Learned at ISTE 2012 - Mike Park

Notes: What I Learned at ISTE 2012 : San Diego

-Mike Park-

The Oreo Project

Using lots of Oreo cookies, students form groups to compete for tallest stack of cookies, best design using them, and the incorporation of other disciplines. For example, in math: calculate the height of one thousand cookies given the height of one.

Discovery Education

SAAS already subscribes to http://www.discoveryeducation.com/ which is Discovery Plus.

New this year, however, is the Student Center which provides the ability to manage student assignments.

[An Amusing Ap is any application which is of interest but not worth further study]

Amusing Ap: Mad Pad which inputs video clips and outputs an array of them.

Amusing Ap: Http://tinyurl.com/DENbrain which produces a collage of user quotes on a topic.

A great way to convert long urls to a small mnemonic esp. to share websites: Http://tinyurl.com

Worth remembering: A normal timer to buzzer with great options: E.ggtimer.com

Amusing Ap: A timer with the option of having input sound/video instead of final buzzer: http://www.timer-tab.com/

Google “A Google A Day” to find a google site with extra window containing a question whose answer is best found by Googling! Input accepted, hints offered, it’s mostly a guise for a Google ad.

Amusing Ap: Yasiv.com is a shopping safari with an especially amusing results screen.

http://www.symbaloo.com/ is a visual display of your favorite web addresses. An Amusing offshoot is http://Symbalooedu.com/.

For many more Amusing Aps checkout Mike Gorman and his 108 ways to use word clouds.

Good reference for doing what it says: http://www.fakeiphonetext.com/

Where to start for orchestrating pictures, videos, and sound to a video production: Animoto.com

Another way to do the same thing: photopeach.com but here you can embed quiz questions.

Adaptive Curriculum

http://www.adaptivecurriculum.com/us/index.html is a free digital library of math resources as well as interactive options and professional development components. Seems more directed to higher levels than sixth grade.

http://mathlanding.org/ is a good resource for skill games and warm up exercises. These folks are partnered with the math forum at Drexel University.

Thinkport.org is Maryland’s central site for finding acadmic resources.

Top 10 tips for going Google

When Will He Learn: ISTE 2011 suggested I use their foundation to make a website. I did:

https://sites.google.com/a/seattleacademy.org/6th-grade-math-2010-2011/

ISTE 2012 made the same suggestion. I should begin populating this site now...

Google also suggested: use the “more > lab” Google tab to share docs in calendar

http://goo.gl/ is the Google approach to abbreviating long urls. See also tinyurl

On Google Earth you can view historical by date, though older shots are typically less clear.

Google still provides the option to create and grade tests. Roger does this well.

Demonstrated was Google’s Image search: drop pic/image to browser to search for similar images. Impressive. This works in Firefox, as well.

Also of interest: via Google settings (gear) you can search by reading level or file type.

Demonstrated was Google’s search box microphone so you can talk in your search request

Did you know... You can setup a free Google phone number for kids to text you or call you?

It can record both sides of conversation, can send file to Google account. You can also call forward from that Google number to a real phone. See Google Voice for the number.

Arcademics.com

We already use Arcademics.com to provide skills development drills in the form of games online. Kids can create either public or private games and kids can compete with others online. For these multiplayer games, computer will fill in when there are no real competitors. Also, computer will always temper its speed to kids work in order to keep the kid connected. Note this site is more to help develop fluency than for advanced topics.

Note to iPad users, there’s an Ap (Rover) which is a browser that translates Flash products for iPad.

New offering: Division derby. 12 person game.

Note that keyboard entry is faster than mouse input.

Check out Puppy pull which is a tug o war. Interesting note is that the tugging power increases as game progresses

Meteor blaster is an example of an older module from the original game

Games are free now...but the site is now affiliated with a for-profit company. The money will come from Arcademics Plus which tracks kids’ history. Though it says online that the cost is "$200 per class", the presenter promised that it’s really "$5 per kid per year"

The Latest and Greatest

I went to a presentation today about stuff that's new and cool.  Here are a few items you might find interesting (bonus: most of them are free). 

http://www.rockmelt.com/ Tired of flipping back and forth between your browsing, your Facebook, your Twitter, and your RSS feed?  You can have it all with RockMelt, a browser that integrates all that fun stuff at once. Use a button to instantly add things to your RSS feed, and then see it scrolling on the side of your screen.  And your Facebook chat can run right along with. 

http://www.signupgenius.com/ Pre-made sign up forms for all sorts of things (they've got lots of education type sign ups.) You can customize them as needed, and send them via email. 

http://primarypad.com/ Collaboration central.  Create a pad and provide the link and people can join in with typed text, PDFs, or whatever they would like to include.  It sounds a lot like what you can do in Google Docs, but the real bonus here is that there is no signup or login necessary for the participants so you can run with it pretty much immediately.

http://www.tagxedo.com/ This is Wordle on 'roids.  It's the same concept of word clouds, but with far more customization options, including being able to shape the cloud itself. 

http://www.classdojo.com/ Now we're getting into the really education focused stuff.  This is totally free software specifically for tracking classroom behavior.  Set up your participants and customize it to exactly what you need and have one-click ability to track behavior in class.  Not only that, it'll track the data over time, so you can graph and see patterns at a glance.  You can also reward good behavior instantly.  And if you want to share it, that's easily done as well.

http://www.scoop.it/ - Showing your class a list of boring old links (like I'm doing here!!) can be done a better way using Scoop It.  Populate the page with different web resources, all in one place, on a visually appealing board.  It also allows users to comment and give feedback.  Sort of like Pinterest for news and content.

http://www.proust.com/ Students can create autobiographies for free (or a biography of anybody, really).  If they're writing about themselves, it gives helpful prompts, creates a timeline, and can be made into a PDF or an actual book.  The prompts are great for provoking a more detailed and structured story.

http://wufoo.com/  Building online forms is usually pretty wretched, but Wufoo makes it ridiculously simple.  As in, drag and drop simple.  Customize it to get just what you need and send it out.  Bonus:  it gives you stats once the results are in.  It's free up to 150 respondents, and after that the price is still pretty reasonable.

Flip Cam #3

Caitlin rocked a t-shirt and won a flip cam!!! Way to go Newbies. :)

Flip Cam #2!!!

Jacque just won a flip cam! (no math battle neccessary...just good looks and a t-shirt). BALLIN!