Last month I was lucky to be sent to the ISTE 2013 conference in San Antonio, Texas. This year I have been the iPad coordinator at my school and since I'm still kind of a newbie to all of this tech stuff I decided to head south to Texas and check out what all the buzz about ISTE was. For those of you that don't know, ISTE stands for International Society for Technology in Education. If you want to know more, check out the site, https://www.iste.org/.
I've been to several teaching conferences before, probably about one major conference a year since I started teaching seven years ago. ISTE was probably the largest conference that I've been to and I was COMPLETELY overwhelmed. But I LOVED IT! I think I read somewhere that there were about 13,000 people there. It was chaos, it was information overload, but it was AMAZING.
I arrived on Sunday and went to my first session Monday morning at 8am. I went from session to session without time to catch my breath in between. I think I stayed till 6 that night. I repeated these steps for the following two days. I think I attended at least 8 sessions a day, maybe more. I could not get enough.
So, I have a goal for this coming school year. I want to attempt to try every single thing that I learned at ISTE at least once. From QR Codes (which I've actually done a ton with but learned even more) to this new Augmented Reality that I had never seen before.
I was amazed at all that technology has to offer us as educators and I left San Antonio with an excitement for what I would be able to do. The only downside was that the conference was in June and I have to wait till the end of August to try this all with my students. I mean...I guess I'll take my summer break...but I secretly wish this conference was later in the summer so that I could take that passion that I left with and use it all immediately!
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Where to begin...
So, I'm not quite sure how to get started with a blog, but here goes. I'm a fourth grade teacher and I recently started leading professional development on technology. For two days I taught 25 teachers how to use SmartBoards and iPads in the classroom. Of course the timing of this was insane for me because I got out of school on a Friday and had to lead the PD the Monday and Tuesday after. Not only did I have to worry about wrapping up the school year and leading this PD, but I was also informed by my principal that almost every teacher in our school would be changing classrooms and that we needed to be completely packed up a week after school was out. All of the teachers got a head start those two days that I was leading my PD, so to say I was a little stressed was an understatement.
Being someone who doesn't get stressed or nervous too often I had a crazy time preparing for my PD because I was so nervous! I had done basic PD with teachers at my school but this was the first time that I would be presenting to a group of teachers that I didn't know. It's one thing to teach a room full of kids, it was a whole other ballgame teaching teachers. Not only that, the sessions were all day long! 6 hours each! I didn't know how I could talk about one topic for 6 hours. As soon as I got started, I caught my rhythm and I quickly realized that I could easily go on for many more hours about iPads and SmartBoards.
At the end of my first day of PD I had one of the teachers ask me if I had a blog that they could follow. I quickly started laughing and responded, "If God could miraculously turn the day into 48 hours then I would be glad to do that". However, this teacher really got me thinking. Could I really offer something to another teacher by creating a blog? The one thing that I realized while teaching these teachers is that I LOVE being able to help teachers be better teachers. If I can give some ideas that will help even just one teacher then I guess a blog would be worth it. Who knows if I'll even get anyone to follow me?
I hope to use this blog as a platform to hand out ideas about the classroom, lesson planning, behavioral management, and technology. I am by no means an expert on any of these topics, but I've learned that the way education is moving, many people turn to the internet for ideas on what they can do in their own classroom. Take a look at the thousands of teacher blogs out there, Pinterest, Teachers Pay Teachers, and the millions of other ways that teachers are out there on the internet helping each other. I guess this is a way to try and open up my classroom to people outside of my little old school.
So, for today, that is all. I'm going to work on my list of potential posts that I plan on blogging about. Hopefully I can get a good start on this during the summer because I know that as soon as school gets started I will be in a crazed mindset again just like every other teacher come August/September!
Courtney
Being someone who doesn't get stressed or nervous too often I had a crazy time preparing for my PD because I was so nervous! I had done basic PD with teachers at my school but this was the first time that I would be presenting to a group of teachers that I didn't know. It's one thing to teach a room full of kids, it was a whole other ballgame teaching teachers. Not only that, the sessions were all day long! 6 hours each! I didn't know how I could talk about one topic for 6 hours. As soon as I got started, I caught my rhythm and I quickly realized that I could easily go on for many more hours about iPads and SmartBoards.
At the end of my first day of PD I had one of the teachers ask me if I had a blog that they could follow. I quickly started laughing and responded, "If God could miraculously turn the day into 48 hours then I would be glad to do that". However, this teacher really got me thinking. Could I really offer something to another teacher by creating a blog? The one thing that I realized while teaching these teachers is that I LOVE being able to help teachers be better teachers. If I can give some ideas that will help even just one teacher then I guess a blog would be worth it. Who knows if I'll even get anyone to follow me?
I hope to use this blog as a platform to hand out ideas about the classroom, lesson planning, behavioral management, and technology. I am by no means an expert on any of these topics, but I've learned that the way education is moving, many people turn to the internet for ideas on what they can do in their own classroom. Take a look at the thousands of teacher blogs out there, Pinterest, Teachers Pay Teachers, and the millions of other ways that teachers are out there on the internet helping each other. I guess this is a way to try and open up my classroom to people outside of my little old school.
So, for today, that is all. I'm going to work on my list of potential posts that I plan on blogging about. Hopefully I can get a good start on this during the summer because I know that as soon as school gets started I will be in a crazed mindset again just like every other teacher come August/September!
Courtney
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