Summer Learning - ISTE and Google Summit

WOW!  My summer was busy learning more and more just for our teachers, students and their teachers.  I loved it.  Special thanks to Mrs. Kaye for her support and belief that we need to make digital citizenship and technical understanding part of our everyday teaching and PTA for sponsoring me at GAFE and believing that teacher professional development directly benefits students, parents and teachers.  YAY!

I attended the ISTE Conference - what is ISTE you may ask.  It is the largest and arguably the best tech conference for teachers (over 40,000 attendees for the week).  ISTE stands for International Society for Technical Education.  They are the standard makers - and they just revised their Student Standards for 2016.  These are the standards JeffCo follows for students.  As a community we need to take a look at how we are implementing and teaching students how to utilize technology in all aspects of not only their academic work but also how we use tech in our everyday.  We pioneers in teaching and parenting in a pervasive digital world.

First and most interesting is I was part of a team of teachers from JeffCo who played ISTE Family Feud and WE WON!!!!  Our school will now have some hardware we can utilize for student learning courtesy of ____. I cannot wait to share our new technology with the school.  I was also allowed a long term borrow of new "overhead projector" which is so much smaller and affordable for our school.   It also has the ability to change the way we view documents but more on that later.

So much learning and so many tools are on my mind and how to best utilize the hardware we have, the hardware we may need in the future and how to get our students in line with the best and brightest in the tech world.

One amazing product that we will introduce in the Spring Semester for 7th and 8th grade students will be a general course on coding.  We will utilize logic, a blockly language and a very basic intro to Java.  This will allow for our jr. high students to make informed decisions regarding their high school choices.  So many jobs need some type of understanding of basic coding.  We will use Sphero robots to play, learn and question.

I have so many ideas for different ways