Monday
- Ignite Session #1
- This was a rapid-fire collection of speakers, each with 5 minutes to go through 20 slides. It had several interesting speakers, but nothing I found of great use for our district. The link here includes a video of the session, if you're interested. I especially recommend the woman from Joplin, Missouri, describing how they re-opened schools after the tornadoes that destroyed the schools in the spring of 2011.
- There's an App for That
- This session highlighted a number of very cool and useful apps (mostly for iOS, but some for Android). The link here lists all the apps discussed at the session and a few more.
- Generation Yes
- How do you do PD for teachers and problem-based-learning for students at the same time? Have students provide tech support. Generation Yes has implemented this in multiple schools with lots of benefits for students and teachers. The link here is to the Generation Yes main website.
Tuesday
- Instructional Delivery in Digital Age Learning Environments
- This was a panel discussion focusing on blended and online classes in the state of California. I learned about various programs like CLRN and iNACOL; but didn't take away too much else.
- Many Faces of the Flipped Classroom
- This was the best session I attended all week. A panel discussion hosted by Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams highlighted the varieties of ways in which flipped learning could be implemented. I particularly appreciated the comments from Brian Bennett, Stacey Roshan, and Ramsey Musallam. The link here is to the conference session description; scroll down for a great collection of links and resources.
- Project Tomorrow
- Another great panel discussion, led by Julie Evans of Project Tomorrow, sharing the results of student and teacher surveys regarding (among other topics) the use of mobile devices in the classroom. The link here is to the Project Tomorrow main website.
- Science and Mobile Learning
- While this session had "science" in the name, it was primarily about mobile technology, with a small bit about attaching sensors to mobile devices for recording data. They did show some nice near-field-communication apps on mobile devices that can allow groups of students to collaborate on their own devices immediately.
Wednesday
- Classroom Flipping: How We Did It
- This was a pretty good session by two instructional technology support teachers about their own experiences helping teachers flip their classrooms. The website linked here has a lot of very useful resources.
- Google Apps
- This session was delivered by a group of Google Certified Teachers, and the only reason it wasn't very useful to me was that I already knew most of what they were describing. The link here is to their presentation; for people in our district, I would recommend looking at the part about Google+. The rest of it is irrelevant since we have already adopted Google Apps for Education.
- Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture
- Some more nice examples of how a flipped classroom might look. The speaker tended to ramble, however, about her own philosophies of education. (I'm used to presentations at science or science-education conferences: What's the problem, what's our hypothesis, how did we test it, what are the results? Bing bang boom.)
I'll post later about resources I collected from poster sessions and exhibits.
