Thinking About Learning

This was my 2nd year to attend UTC.  Last year I presented, but this year I just wanted to go as a sponge and absorb.  I must say that I was very impressed and pleased with my experiences!  The Greenville County School District provides this conference free to participants.  Obviously their main target audience is their own teachers, who receive a trade day for attending.  But at the same time, the conference is open free to anyone.  What a gift!!!  In my opinion, this conference is much better than the state-wide Ed Tech conference held in the fall, because most of these presenters are teachers, people who are sharing what works in the trenches.

The keynote speaker was Chris Craft, a Spanish teacher from Crossroads Elementary in Irmo, SC.  Chris has done some phenomenal work with a global project, Life Round Here, and is currently working on completing his Phd.  His informative, entertaining presentation, “Superpowers for Everyday Heroes,” shared great tips of ways he incorporates technology in the classroom.  Chris is an expert at preparing interesting presentations.  During this presentation, he had an entertaining “dialogue” with his computer, “Maria.”  That same day, our governor, Mark Sanford, admitted to an affair with an Argentinian woman named Maria.  Just an ironic coincidence, but a little humorous!

The sessions I attended were great!  I got some wonderful ideas for assessment that I plan to share with my faculty.  One is a free web-based interactive program called Hot Potatoes.  This tool includes templates for crossword, matching quizzes, and cloze activities and provides instant feedback.  Michelle O’Malley led this great session.  Another session that focused on assessment was a session called “Creating Online Polls and Self-Grading Quizzes” by Kim Pauls. Kim demonstrated how to use google forms to create quizzes and how to set up formulas for the quizzes to be automatically scored.

Some of the other awesome sessions included:

• In “Using Collaborative Tools,” Cathy Jo Nelson and Fran Bullington had a great dueling showdown between wikis and google docs.
• My friend and colleague, Mike Edwards, did a terrific presentation on “Augmented Reality.” This has been a cutting-edge, personal exploration for him, and I have been privileged to delve into this a little with him.
• Amanda LaBlanc did a useful hands-on session on Flip Video Cameras.  Each grade level at my school is getting one this coming year, so that was a great training session.
• Ellen Gordon did a fabulous session, “Goodbye Overhead…Hello Doc Cam.”  In the new school year, my district is providing a doc cam for every classroom, and I left this session with lots of ways to use it in various curricular areas.

Another fun experience was a “Tweet-up” held at Wild Wings Wednesday evening.  It was so cool to meet people face-to-face who are part of my PLN.  Twitter is one of my best sources of professional development, and the people in my PLN are very helpful to me.  It was fantastic!

Thanks to Greenville County School District and all the presenters!  It was a very valuable personal growth experience.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.