Report 1 from the ISTE Blogger’s Cafe
#edtech #iste11
I can’t believe it is only Tuesday, the second official day of ISTE, and I am already exhausted. It is like sensory overload for all of us edtech geeks. So while I wait for the caffeine to give me my second wind, I wanted to file this report.
Monday, Day 1 of ISTE:
I started the day in the exhibitor’s hall, which is my favorite part of ISTE. I checked in with my friends at Atomic Learning to show off the cool QR Code T-shirt they gave me they were impressed and invited me to dinner, more on that later. I cruised around the other exhibitors looking for the “next big thing” which I will report on later.
Later I caught a great ISTE Unplugged session on Passion Driven Teaching and Learning by Angela Maiers and Amy Sandvold, IT WAS AMAZING! I can’t wait to order their book.
Soon it was two o’clock and time for my three hour volunteer stint in the Docotor is In booth to help with tech support. I brought my son Peter along and we helped attendees with their minor computer troubles, Peter mostly helped with iPad issues, like helping people set up a Twitter account. They gave us bright orange T-shirts that we wore with pride for the rest of the day.
By six o’clock we were at an incredible Italian restaurant call Maggiano’s at the Atomic Learning dinner. Dan Meyer, CEO of Atomic Learning, welcomed us and then the staff of Maggiano’s brought out the best Italian food I have ever eaten. I sat by Mark R. and Dave R. from the Port Huron school district who are two fun edtech guys that are doing great work in their district, plus they listened as I brag about my students — 10 points for the two guys from Port Huron. By the time they brought out dessert my 15 year old son had eaten his weight in lasagna, but after seeing the chocolate cake, he had to dig deep to stuff a little more of that in. Dan caught on to his dilemma and ordered him another piece to take back to the hotel — thank you Dan!
After the Atomic Learning dinner we walked a few blocks over to the Elephant and Castle for the Digital Jam with Kevin Honeycutt. We rocked the night away with all they other iPad musicians. (photos to come)
On the eleven o’clock train back to our hotel I worked on my presentation of Unbelievable Elementary Tech Projects that I am giving at 1:30 PM at ISTE unplugged — come and see.
- Brad Flickinger
Many QR Codes Walking Around at ISTE
#iste11 #edtech
So my friends at Atomic Learning and myself get this great idea to include wear a big QR Code on the backs of our dark black T-shirts. It links to this great little educator video on YouTube. Cool in theory, but kind of weird in practice. Everywhere I go people are sneaking up behind me to take a picture of my back with their camera phones. I think I’m getting paranoid! (You will need a QR Code app for your smartphone to know what I am talking about.)
- Brad Flickinger
Jamming at ISTE in the Blogger’s Cafe
#edtech #edchat #iste11
So there I was minding my own business at ISTE in the Blogger’s Cafe busily writing the previous blog post when in walks Kevin Honeycutt and before you know it we were jamming on our iPods and iPads and having a great time. Before too long David Warlick and others had joined in. I love ISTE — Edu-Geeks unite! Here are some photos I took while I jammed along.
- Brad Flickinger
My 5 Take-Aways from Edubloggercon
#ebc11 #edtech #elearning #iste11
I am currently hanging out in the blogger cafe at ISTE 2011 in Philadelphia and having a great time with my fellow bloggers. But before I get caught up with everything ISTE, I wanted to get a few things written down about yesterday’s Edubloggercon. So here are my five take-aways:
1. BYOD IS UNSTOPPABLE. (Bring Your Own Device) Five years from now we will be laughing about how we wanted to buy all students a district owned laptop for 1:1, when all students really wanted to do was to bring their own devices like iPods, iPads, and smartphones. We need to let them store in the cloud and not on our networks and let them use cloud based apps like Google Docs.
2. TEACH WITH PASSION, LEARN WITH PASSION: We all crowded around a local 16 year old student named Jeff who taught us that he wants to learn from teachers who are passionate about their subjects so that he can be passionate about his learning. He has been lucky that at his school he has such teachers — we were amazed.
3. STUDENTS SHOULD HELP STUDENTS: Before a student gets help from his teacher he should ask 3 or 4 of his classmates. Holy crud, the teacher doesn’t have all the answers! I don’t know how to use Prezi, so should I ban my students from using it? No, instead we should let them teach each other technology that we don’t understand.
4. STUDENTS WANT SOME AUTONOMY: They want to have a little choice in what they do. If we give an assignment, we should let them pick their own method of learning proof — sometimes. You could really be surprised by what you get back (good and bad).
5. MAKE A GOOGLE CLASSROOM: This one is connected to the point I made above. If you don’t know already, the company of Google has an 80/20 rule. Employees are to give 80% of their time to current Google projects, the other 20% of the time they can work on whatever they want — they still must work, but they can work on anything. Imagine if we allowed that at school. Just think of the cool projects that kids could work on during this free learning time.
To be fair, I must admit that only attended 1/8th of the discussion, since there were 8 classes per hour and I had to pick. So this was my take, other participants probably walked away with totally different ideas.
- Brad Flickinger
Read MoreMy 5 big take-aways from TIE Colorado 2011
#edtech #tie2011 #elearning
I am stuck on my plane at the terminal in Denver while they fix a sensor, so I am taking some time to write this post before I head to Philly for ISTE (so far we have been stuck on the Tarmac for 2 hours). To say that this year’s TIE conference was amazing would be an understatement, so here are my top five take-aways from this incredible conference.
1. TEXTBOOKS ARE DEAD: I love libraries just as much as anyone, but the reality is that digital media is getting bigger and bigger, especially when it comes to textbooks. The time will come in the near future that schools, districts, teachers and students will embrace the idea that to have digital textbooks is more economical and practical than tree-killing paper ones.
2. TWITTER IS NOT JUST A PASSING CRAZE: last week Apple announced that Twitter will be built into its upcoming new release of it’s new operation system (IOS), meaning that it will be integrated into everything. Here at TIE, there was a big separation between the Tweeters and Non-Tweeters. Those on Twitter got so much more from the conference because of everything they were getting from Twitter. I loved to follow the back channels from the different sessions to keep up on everything that was happening and what other attendees were thinking.
3. THE CLOUD IS THE FUTURE: Those in the know, do not store anything on their computers, that’s so last year. Instead, everything is in the cloud — mostly by using Google Docs. There is an incredible feeling of power when you know that you can get all your files that you have ever created on any device; smart phone, iPad, laptop, etc. Some people even demonstrated the idea of a personal cloud in your house that allows you to access your information from anywhere. Nice!
4. BUILDING A PERSONAL LEARNING NETWORK IS CRITICAL: my PLN is everything to me, and being at TIE allowed me to add some really incredible people. People that will help me be a better tech teacher, people that I can turn to for advice and ideas, people that are passionate about what they do.
5. EDTECH PEOPLE LOVE WHAT THEY DO: it doesn’t matter if it is a session that you are sitting in or attending a social gathering, you soon find out that for the most part these edtech people are crazy about what they do — some to the point of obsession. But it’s all good.
So there are five things from my list of over 25 things that I am going to take back to my school. Farewell TIE for this year and I’ll count the days until we can get together next year and do this again. I had a great time and I know that this coming school year is going to be so much better thanks to my time at TIE.
- Brad Flickinger
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