January 5th PD strand meeting

I enjoyed meeting with the other tech scouts to try out some cool technology ideas from Stacy! Michelle and I used an electronics kit called Littlebits where you can put them together to help create inventions and super cool things that are still slightly over my head.  I don't even know how this happened, but Michelle and I was able to use the Little Bits to connect them so that we could turn on lights and move things around with our separate controller. Our vision was to make the University of Alabama "A" and have it light up inside of a stadium (a cardboard box) but we didn't make it that far.  Super excited though that it worked and would love to work with it more during some of our top secret ideas we have moving forward. PS Seeing some of the things the kids at the school do with this technology and the inventions they come up with is amazing!

GaETC Conference

On Wednesday, November 4 I went to the GaETC conference.  I LOVED the keynote speaker Angela Maiers and her #youmatter message.  It really got me thinking about how to make all the children in my class feel important and worth it and I love following her feed on twitter now to get more ideas.  At the conference I attended a session about Genius Hour.  I am still trying to figure out if there is a way I could implement this into my classroom at a second grade level, but I love the concept and idea of letting the kids come up with their own idea or thing they want to learn about and conducting the research and resources independently.  I also attended an App Smashing session.  I can't wait till the 100th day of school so I can use the aging app with the chatter pix app so they can take their picture of themselves "aging" and then record a message and have it look like they are talking!  I also attended a session on where schools will be in 25 years and how schools need to prepare to get there.  It is both scary and exciting to think about how much education, teaching and learning will change over that course of time.  Overall, I enjoyed the conference and came away with some new technology ideas to try.