Grand View Universty TeachMeet

Yesterday was a day of learning and inspiration.  I spent the day at the Jacobson Visiting Scholar Symposium at Grand View University.  Last year was the the initial year for this event.   I attended then and I enjoyed it.  This year was even better.

The morning started out with a delicious breakfast provided by the university.  We started the day with a keynote address by visiting scholar, Dr. Erica Boling from Rutgers University.  Dr. Boling talked about Transforming Education through Multimedia and Technology.

Following the keynote, we chose between three breakout sessions, presented by Dr. Boling, Alex Kitchen of the Bondurant Schools, and Steven Hopper from Heartland AEA.  I sat in on Dr. Boling's presentation about using screencasting.  She talked about the power of  using video, particularly video created by students, to learn.  Some of the examples she showed us using tools like Animoto carried that powerful message forward.

I used to use Animoto a lot, but during the past couple years I haven't.  Dr. Boling showed us a video that she has used to introduce herself to students, which is something I used to do, but for some reason stopped.  I also used to use Animoto as a communication tool with parents to show some of the great work kids were doing, and I am going to get back to doing that.

The afternoon was devoted to fifteen minute TeachMeet Sessions, including one presented by yours truly.  I came away with lots of new things to explore, as well as reminders to return to some things I have tried in the past.

Some of the things I want to explore are:

• The communities on Google +.  I didn't have any idea how many there were.  
• Photopeach, which works like Animoto
• For screencasting I have used Jing.  I want to check out Screenr and Screencastomatic.
• Popplet for mind mapping.  This was a session presented by Christine Smith.
• Oh, yes!  The Too Noisy App for the iPad, which totally cracked me up.  I am afraid my kids might enjoy setting it off, but it was funny.  That was presented by Jen Wells, who also talked about other Classroom Management Technology like Class Dojo.

I presented a session on Digital Story Telling.  I showed the group the things my students have created using Bitstrips for Schools, Voki, Kidblog, and Storybird.  You can see the things we talked about by visiting our class Wibki.  The links are on the writing page.

I was really excited to see one of my colleagues from school there.  It was nice to share the day with one of my coworkers.  This was time well spent, and it reminded me how powerful some of these tools are,  not to mention the energy and ideas shared by fellow educators.

The Jacobson Symposium

Saturday, I attended the Jacobson Visiting Scholar Symposium at Grand View University.  This was an opportunity that was offered free of charge to area teachers.  I am so glad that I decided to go.  The keynote speaker was Dr. Laurie A. Henry from the University of Kentucky.  She talked about literacy and how that has been impacted and changed because of technology.  It was thought provoking.  I also attended one of her sessions later in the day about Literature Circles.

Later in the morning I attended Steven Hopper's  session about Social Media in the Classroom.   He is @thinkteach on Twitter.  It really inspired me to get back to using Edmodo.  If you are not familiar with Edmodo, it looks much like Facebook, except it is much safer for elementary kids.  Only people with the group code can access your posts.  I have not introduced Edmodo to this year's class at all.  In the past, I have used it to discuss books with reading groups.  I also have used it as a webquest.  Yesterday I realized that I have not tapped most of it's potential at all.  It can be a good communication tool with parents, and can be an excellent tool if you are interested in doing a flipped classroom.  It is a great way to get reluctant writers to participate in discussion and write responses.

The afternoon was set up as TeachMeet Sessions.  Sessions were short and presented by many of the participants.  This is similar to EdCamp, which I love.

I learned about QR Codes from Jen Wells.  This is something I just haven't understood in the past. I downloaded apps to my phone, while we were there, and now I'm set to go.

I was intrigued by Jeff Mullin's ideas for using music for classroom management.  I am definitely going to give this a try.  He plays certain tunes to signal transitions, or time to pass in papers.  He uses Playlist.com, which I plan to explore.

Jess Dow presented a session about Weebly.  I have a Weebly classroom website.  Sometimes I have trouble keeping it up to date.  Okay, most of the time, I have trouble keeping it up to date. I picked up some great ideas from this session about adding PDFs for spelling words, and embedding links to videos to help parents and kids with math skills, like partial product multiplication.  These ideas will make my website a much better resource for kids and parents alike.

Dr. Lindsay Grow and Jen Wells talked about Enhancing Vocabulary with Online Visual Tools.  Here are just some of the tools I plan to check out.

Graffiti Creator

Word Mover

Trading Cards

Visual Thesaurus

Tag Galaxy

Wordnik

Visuwords

Lexipedia

Grapholite

This is fun.  What do you love?

This was an awesome way to spend a Saturday with great people, inspiring ideas, and good food, in a beautiful building.  This is the first of what is to become an annual event, and I will definitely be signing up next year.