Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Digital Playground ~ Today's Meet

At Powdersville Elementary, the iTeachers and I host an optional after school tech session in the media center each month. The goal is to bring teachers together for fun, sharing, and learning! I believe that it is in these informal sharing sessions where the real magic happens... where teachers have an opportunity to talk and share with one another.

For our December session, we transformed the media center into a coffee shop with cocoa, cappuccino, coffee, creamer, and toppings. Thanks to Melissa Wilcox and Rachel Wayne for making some delicious goodies and to our local Starbucks for donating some cups and coupons! Also, thanks to Brenna Wilkie for putting together a slideshow for teachers to enjoy as they came together today.



To get started, each table of teachers chose a team leader and a group name. The team leader was responsible for signing in and recording responses in Today's Meet. I opened a room for our "chat," and posted questions throughout the session using Twitter chat "language." Click here for the list of questions! These questions sparked some great conversation. This was a great way to help those that have not yet participated in a Twitter chat to feel more comfortable. It was also a great way to show how this website can be used in the classroom.
To end our session, teachers were asked to use a Christmas Photo Booth app to decorate a selfie. Selfies were posted to Twitter using #pvestweets, and I used these Tweets to put teachers into a random name generator for giveaways.



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Friday, December 11, 2015

On the Road Again...

Based on survey results from my last session, our December Transform Session focused on presentation tools for teachers and students. In selecting the apps/tools to share this month, I again tried to balance already familiar apps with the "new" in order to meet the needs of two different teacher groups: those who want to dig deeper into tools they already know and those who are always on the lookout for new tools!

Quizalize was a popular webtool shared last month, so I decided to use this quick assessment (Code: mbh692) to kick off our December Session. This warm-up gave me great feedback on teacher knowledge of the assessment tools from last time and served as a pretest covering a few of the tools for this session. Additionally, I was able to show my teachers how to access the quality item analysis features within Quizalize.

Next, teachers selected an article on student choice to quickly review and discuss with the group. Many groups commented that we are too often telling students what they must learn, how to learn it, and how to show what they've learned. Technology allows us to offer so many opportunities for student ownership and choice in their learning!



Using the information presented in their selected article, teachers were given an opportunity to explore Keynote, Prezi, FlowVella, Haiku Deck, Google Slide, Nearpod, ClassFlow, Pear Deck, Canva, and/or Buncee with the goal of choosing one to create a quick sample presentation. These presentations were shared with me via Google Classroom.

Haiku Deck was very popular among all groups K-12, and those in the early grades were very excited about Buncee. Teachers continue to enjoy having choice during the sessions, and feedback was encouraging. One teacher commented, "I really liked learning about these tools, and we had great discussion today. I actually wish the session could have been longer. This would be a great way to spend a technology in-service day because we could work together and go over multiple tools and actually create content for classes." Another teacher wrote, "Loved getting to create my own presentation. This enabled me to actually learn how to use the app, and I now have ideas for incorporating this next week!"











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