2016 Georgia Educational Technology Conference

I admit it. I am a conference addict. As educators, we all have our 'thing'-Diet Coke, Dr. Pepper, an IV of coffee continuously pumping Caramel Macchiato into our veins, those little bars of Hershey goodness hidden in the back of our drawers so nobody sees...but mine is conferences. Specially the awesome kind. Which GaETC is. 

While I have attended GaETC before, this year I was blessed to have a paid registration fee from receiving the Technology Innovation Grant last year. 

While there a great many things I learned this year, here are my top takeaways:

#1
Presenting!

Getting ready to present in the largest room EVER

One of the things I love most about attending conferences is presenting. I really love being able to share the good, the bad, and the ugly with other educators to show how easy (ok...and super hard) project-based learning can be BUT I also love getting feedback from others outside of my 'people.'  It's always nice to see how other grade levels, content areas, districts, etc. could use the project and offer their own input to make it even better.  It's the heart of collaboration as educators. 

I'm new to Richmond Hill Elementary School this year so many of my coworkers may not know this, but I was one of four GaETC Technology Innovation Grant recipients in the state of Georgia last year. Under the grant, I was able to co-teach a semester's worth of 7th grade biology with an astounding classroom teacher in an inquiry-based teaching model with Google Classroom.  While Kayla, the science guru, taught the traditional science standards, I was able to come in and help with research and information literacy skills. Students created new organisms using stuffed animal parts, applied their knowledge of biomes, adaptations, food chains, and food webs to their new organism, and then wrote children's books about their new organisms.  Students loved writing their e-books and once the project was finished, we took a field trip to the local elementary school to read our books and discuss the writing process. It was an amazing experience for me as an educator, but also an authentic, real-world inquiry-based project for our students. 

As part of the grant, I presented the project to others and was able to attend the conference for free. All of the resources for the presentation and the project can be found here.

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#2
Networking

Educators are a special type of professional who often lack networking opportunities, especially those of us in the library field.  Conferences are a wonderful, authentic way to connect with other educators and meet with our PLN (professional learning network) from Twitter.  Because there is often only one media specialist in each building, it's essential we connect with other media specialists across our district, state, and around the world to discuss our ideas, projects, frustrations, ah-ha moments, data, and our daily lives in schools.  I have been lucky enough to develop a really supportive PLN through #tlchat, #mslibchat, and #istelib, but there are so many more groups on Twitter you can meet with depending on your needs and desires in a PLN. While I was teaching in a one-to-one district, my PLN consisted mainly of #1to1teched and #1to1techat.  If you are interested in tracking down a Twitter group for yourself and to view the official Twitter Education chat schedule visit here.

Besides meeting up with PLN members from Twitter, having fluid, authentic moments spark from sessions is one of the most essential aspects of going to conferences for me.  It's easy to get bogged down in session timing, schedules, and trying to pace from one side of the arena to the other, but we really need to take that moment to talk to the neighbor next to you before a session starts, speak with presenter afterwards for questions or clarification or just to say 'good job!'  During one session on Flipgrid (I'm sorry that I don't remember the name), I was sitting next to another media specialist from Augusta, Georgia.  It turns out we were both looking to start a Flipgrid project with our 3rd graders in January and that is why we were in the session! Now we are connecting online and our two schools will connect through Flipgrid as part of their social studies projects. If we had been in our own little bubble, we would have never connected like that. 

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#3
Vicki Davis

If you have been hiding under a rock in the blogging world, you may not have heard of her, but Vicki Davis (aka CoolCatTeacher) is a local Georgia girl who has been a shining light of awesome in my teaching/library career.  In a world where there a million and one technology apps, websites, and ways to learn through technology devices, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and not know where to start.  When I started teaching almost a decade ago (boy, that makes me feel OLD), her idea of focusing on THREE things to learn and use in a school year made all the difference to me.  Each year, I have tried to focus on three technology tools to become an expert on and it has changed my life.

She was a main presenter at GaETC (sessions can be found here), but my favorite presentation of hers was on Technology Driven Differentiated Instruction.   I will never understand, with all of the technology we have today, why we are still not talking about this enough.  With Google Classroom, Seesaw, and so many more amazing apps, differentiation should be easy to incorporate into our classrooms.  But it is also easy to forget to connect with kids on a personal level when we on our devices all the time as well.  One of my main focuses as an educator (whether when I was a teacher or now as a media specialist) has always been developing relationships with students.  How do we expect to know how to teach our students or include their voice in our libraries and classrooms if we do not get to know them more than just their names and behaviors in class?  That is really what Vicki was getting down to in her presentation, which I think is important when we are enhancing our lessons with technology. We need to remember who are students are as individuals.

#4
​Seesaw

Where has Seesaw been my whole life?  Ok, my professional, educator life? I felt like at GaETC, Seesaw was a huge buzzword...and once I went to the session "Using Seesaw in the K-2 Classroom" presented by Serena Gable and Mary Harris, I could see why.  It felt like an undercurrent I couldn't really see until I actually learned what it was.  Seesaw is an an interactive digital portfolio that includes web, video, and audio content, and offers immediate response capabilities. There are also many levels of sharing available in Seesaw, so the teacher can determine which assignment responses are visible to parents, other students, or even administrators.  In the session I attended, we acted as students, navigating through assignments and submitting work that was automatically added to our portfolio. As students, we loved the various options and its user-friendliness; as teachers, many of us were eager to incorporate this tool into the classroom.  If you have not checked it out, do it. Do it now. And you can thank me later.

#5
Chris Craft

For those who know me well, or maybe even have just glanced at my Twitter or blog, know my obsession for all things Google.  Last year during my professional development sessions, teachers would start a chocolate eating contest where they had to take a bite of chocolate each time I mentioned Google. But I digress...

Chris Craft is the Google Guru. I met him at the Google Playground at ISTE, but he is an amazing speaker to listen to and learn from so I went to as many of his sessions as I could.  I have been wanting to start the Google Certified Educator program, but with getting my specialist degree, it's always being put off. He has renewed my desire and I think I will definitely do this once I graduate in May.  If you would like to see his presentations, visit this link, but I highly recommend the Top 10 Chrome Extension and Getting Geeky ones!

#6
Learning to Fail

In our educational culture we have created through standardized testing and evaluations based on great observations, it's been indirectly taught that failing is not ok. It has been absorbed into the hearts and minds of our students and our teachers.  It is our jobs as educators to teach that failures can be just as exciting as failures as we are innovating and to create a climate in our classrooms, libraries, and schools in which failure is an option and how to learn from our failures.

“If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.” - Ken Robinson

​So thank you to our keynote speaker, Josh Stumpenhorst, for being so inspirational and showing this video. Innovation means taking risks. If we want our students to learn to create, being innovative, and thrive in questioning everything, we need to create a culture that emphasizes taking risks.

I was so thankful to be able to go to GaETC this year to bring back some ideas for our teachers and for our technology specials, but this year I really focused on finding ideas for transforming our library into a learning commons. More information to come on that later! 

See you next year, GaETC!

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