Mister Mak's Learning 2.0

Whew – last full day in Austin and it was a big one. I had a workshop right at 8:00 a.m. again and had to hit the ground running. My first workshop was Microsoft Office Projects that Kids Love and I got some really good ideas – I don’t know if I’ll do them in Office, but I can definitely see using some of the other new tools that I’ve discovered to spice up the projects even more. The most interesting one was a round robin writing idea, but instead of having one prompt that the whole class adds to, I was thinking of having each student start with a different prompt, add his or her sentence and then shift one computer over and add a sentence to the next story until everyone is back in his or her own seat to finish off the story. (Was that a run on sentence or what?) I don’t know if that’s too much moving around – I might have to sleep on it and try to flesh it out more.

I had some time before my next session so I hit the exhibitors again and was able to meet with the rep for Lexia and My Reading Coach. She’s going to contact me after the convention and set up a demo of their products with the Special Needs Committee and any other interested parties so we can see if one or both would help us to serve our students who have reading difficulties better. I was also able to meet with the rep for Understanding Math, which is a computer assisted interactive math program for all levels. He showed me a some of the features and is going to set me up with a demo of the software – this program also shows promise to help us differentiate our curriculum and help with both remediation and extension activities.

My next session was about an online keyboarding product and it was pretty much a bust – it has some nice features, but isn’t better than what we use already. So, it looks like my search will continue for a better keyboarding program for 6^th grade.

After lunch at Cisco’s (migas… yummm), it was back to the convention for GIMP’in it Up. GIMP is a free, open source program that has many of the same functions as Photo Shop, but FREE. We’ve used it at St. Laurence for a few years, but I picked up some cool, new introductory projects that I think the kids will really enjoy. If you’re interested in learning about the photo editing software yourself (or for your own kids), you can download it at http://www.gimp.org and you can download her tutorials at http://www.txtechnogeeksrus.com – but they won’t be up until Sunday at the earliest.

After that, John and I headed over to the blogger’s area, where John worked on his blog post and I met some new people and exchanged ideas with them. Mostly, we all decompressed and did a brain dump to try and process it all. After another quick stroll through the exhibits (where I scored some new jewelry), I headed  back to the hotel through the freezing rain (thank goodness I finally remembered to bring my umbrella to the convention center). Tonight is the big closing celebration, but since almost everyone else has headed back to Sugar Land and I’m tired, I’ll probably just collapse in my room and get some sleep. I have two more sessions scheduled in the morning (note to self: stop scheduling stuff at 8:00 in the morning - and why does 8:00 a.m. feel so much earlier here?) and the closing keynote and I’ll be headed back to Katy – hopefully, not in a blinding downpour like on the way here. Anyway, I think that we all learned a lot and that John forcing us to blog daily helped fix it in our long-term memory, so we should have a ton to share when we get back. It is a tiring week, but there is so much amazing stuff going on here that I hope we’ve peaked your interest in attending TCEA 2011.