Great Day at Ed Tech Teacher Conference

Yesterday I attended a one day Ed Tech Teacher conference at Medfield HS just up the road. It was a great day, lots of enthusiastic teachers, mostly from schools nearby (although there was a team of 3 from Nantucket) and broad mix of levels - K through 12 and a dose of administrators thrown in as well.

Myth Busters:

These conferences draw a younger crowd, as there is a clear generational divide regarding familiarity and comfort with technology use.

FALSE

Sure, there were younger teachers - thirty-somthings and younger - but I also saw and met quite a few veteran teachers with 15 to 20 years experience. About half were teachers 45 - 55!

It's not about your age, it's about your attitude

Tom Dacord, the founder of Ed Tech Teacher, was a keynote speaker. He's a former history teacher and his talk was about how it's not the technology that matters, but our vision of awesome learning does. Like this Ad from way back touting a typewriter as an Ed Tech innovation with impact! It was another variation on a theme that pops up in the Ed Tech community every so often - I last saw it on the EdSurge blog about how technology won't save our schools.




He showed this video from this year's Google Science Fair. Pretty awesome high school student!

Someday/Monday

He talked about a clever way of thinking about this problem: Someday/Monday. Someday is your vision, your goal, where you want to be someday (unclear) and maybe not sure just exactly how you're going to get there. Someday is your image of what Awesome Learning looks like.

In contrast, Monday is what steps, what tangible actions, what projects you can undertake now, on Monday when you've attended a weekend conference, that can move your teaching practice in the direction of Someday, however small and incremental.

He emphasized, and I think quite rightly, that if you don't have vision, if you don't have a plan with intended outcomes, all you have is a collection of gizmos and confusing tangles of files and programs. But no real expansion in learning.

Another speaker emphasized the importance of not focusing all our attention on Google Apps, but to be open and aware of other platforms. Not only is it a wise choice to select tools based on effectiveness over vendor, but it is also important for preparing students for the real world of work - where everything is not neatly packaged up and organized for you. He argued that Classroom is great for teachers, but questioned if we are doing our students a disservice by having an environment that is so streamlined and well organized when a key job skill is being able to organize a project or set of tasks out of the chaos.

Workshops

I took in a couple of exciting workshops and I'll publish additional blog posts to cover the details. In one workshop we focused on variety of tools and methods for providing rich feedback to student work online - using text, audio, and video. Cool tools.

A second workshop was about using YouTube for online extra help, student projects, or lesson review/study guides.

Teach 'em to Code

There were quite a few teachers there who represented schools committed to the Hour of Code. Interestingly, a number of these teachers are at the Elementary and Middle levels. In one of the workshops I sat next to a woman (veteran science teacher of 17 years) who is teaching programming at a K-5 school in Carver.  Lower grades are using symbolic programming tools like MIT's Scratch, but 4th and 5th graders are creating mobile apps using Java scripting tools!

 Hour of Code

The Hour of Code is a grassroots campaign with the goal of engaging tens of millions of students worldwide to try an Hour of Code during December 7-13, in celebration of Computer Science Education Week. Learn more about the Hour of Code at hourofcode.org.