Final Reflections on TCEA:

1. Despite the trouble of being out for an entire week, the conference is totally worth it. Every year, I pick up so many ideas and find out about new tools that I can use with the students. It’s too bad that it is in Austin every year though – I like Austin, but it would be nice if it was in Houston every few years so I could sleep in my own bed.

1. My number one event – the TATN (Technology Applications Teacher Network) event on Tuesday. If you haven’t checked out their website (http://www.techappsnetwork.org/), you should definitely head right there and sign up as a member. Even if you don’t teach Tech Apps, they have so many good ideas and lesson plans available. Plus – they upload the contents of the awesome CD that they hand out to participants on Tuesday, so you have access to the presenter materials of everyone.

1. The iPhone app – awesome! I didn’t touch my paper program the whole week – of course, that caused a few snafus since bring your own laptop and paid sessions weren’t labeled in the app and the addendums weren’t uploaded. Fortunately, I was able to find other places to go at that time. I also would have liked to see presenter handouts available as downloads and not just vendor stuff. All-in-all, I think that it was a great addition and I hope that they continue it.

1. Most of my presentations were great, but a few were completely off-the-mark. There’s nothing worse than a workshop that’s been misnamed or not described correctly – I went to two different workshops (one paid, one concurrent) that were supposed to be about using technology to enhance the writing process and they didn’t touch on the writing process at all. One of them focused on the tool and had some neat activities, but didn’t touch on the writing process. The other one also talked about some tools (but pretty standard ones) and spent the rest of the time showing examples of student and teacher work – which might have been helpful if there was much of anything on the sites shown. I don’t mind being shown “cool tools” – but that should be what is in the description so I can decide if that’s what I need. Even if it’s a concurrent session that isn’t good, there’s an opportunity cost involved since I could have went to something else that was better. I guess that’s the nature of all conventions though – some stuff is great and some stuff isn’t.

1. The exhibit hall – I like going to the exhibit area, but I wish that it was laid out a little differently. For example, if all the network and security vendors were together, I could just skip that whole area since it isn’t what I’m looking for. I appreciate the fact that the vendors give away prizes and demo copies too – but it’s annoying when they try to get you to scream and do something stupid. I get that they’re giving away product, but they’re also trying to land a big sale so I don’t really feel the need to scream like a maniac in the hopes of being able to demo a product. I suppose that’s not going to change either and I could do like John and only head to the vendors that I’m interested in, but sometimes I don’t know that I’m interested in something until I see it. I also would like to see current sessions that are vendor presented more clearly marked in the program – I don’t appreciate showing up for a session that says it’s about making keyboarding more interesting and having it turn out to be an hour-long commercial for a product.

1. Time Management – I really wanted to go to the model classroom, iPlayground, and Open Source Room, but didn’t have time. It’s hard to manage the exhibits, paid workshops and concurrent sessions and still have time to check out some of the other areas. I wish there was a way to know which sessions weren’t going to work out ahead of time so I could skip them and do something more useful.

1. Keynote sessions – I’d like to see the opening keynote some year. Unfortunately, since paid workshops are scheduled at the same time as the keynote, I inevitably find something that I really want to attend and miss the keynote. It would be nice if no paid sessions were scheduled during that time.

1. Despite the nitpicking nature of several of my items – I really do think that TCEA puts on a great convention. In my previous life as a history teacher, I attended several state social studies and geography conventions – as well as a few national conventions and none of them were managed as well as TCEA. I would like to see the addition of some content strands to make it easier to find the sessions that are most appropriate for your needs. While it’s not that big of a deal for me to navigate the offerings, it can be overwhelming to the content area teachers we bring with us and the introduction of strands would help them navigate the offerings more easily – as would organizing the exhibit hall by vendor offerings.

1. THE App: What a great little iPhone app to help organize the week. Not once did I even look at the paper conference program while I was walking the convention center. Everything (well almost everything) in the app was current and extremely helpful. First, I was able to look at all the sessions and their descriptions and then "star" the sessions if I was interested. By "starring" the session, it was automatically imported into the app calendar. Then, immediately after the session, you could rate that session on a scale of one to five right on the iPhone app. This was huge for me as I was able to quickly look at the sessions I was interested in and then dump them all into the calendar.

   The other part of the app I really like was being able to peruse the list of vendors in the exhibit hall, "star" the vendor, and then look at a map of the hall with all my "starred" vendors placemarked on the map. If you've ever been to TCEA and the exhibit hall, you know this is a good thing given that the size of the exhibit hall was the size of five football fields. I generally have a lot of disdain for trolling the vendor area (except when trying to snag schwag for my kids back home). But there were a few I wanted to touch base with. Being able to pinpoint on the map the vendors I wanted to see really helped me stay away from aimlessly walking around the hall.

   Two suggestions for next year's app: 1. Incorporate the program addendum into the app. I had a rude awakening one morning because the session was moved to another day. Yes, I should have referred to the addendum but I was using my iPhone. 2. Mark on the session descriptions if it is a paid workshop. One of my coworkers showed up to a session only to be turned away because he wasn't aware from the iPhone app that it was a paid workshop.

   In the end however, this little app saved more time for me so I could catch more sessions and of course...

2. Hang out in the Blogger's Cave - This year was so much better than last year. While last year, the Blogger's Garage seemed like an afterthought, this year's "cave" was a great environment to relax, converse, and yes, learn! It was tucked out of the way away from conference noise and you could even look through a window down on the exhibit hall floor. Several times during the conference, I found myself either teaching someone something or learning something from someone in an ad-hoc manner that, in my opinion, was a much better way to learn/teach than with a 45 minute sit-n-git session.

3. Our school staff group blogging effort: It's interesting to see that in many schools, conference attendees are expected to come home and share what they learned. While this is a noble way to follow up and share information, I've rarely seen a successful live presentation of a conference reflection stuck at the end of an after school staff meeting. By the time the meeting rolls around, it's several weeks later, the energy has dwindled, and the audience really isn't interested in staying in the meeting longer than necessary. So, this year, we tried something a little different. We have a technology support blog (which this is posting to along with my own professional blog). I gave access to each of the blogs to the staff attending TCEA. Their mission was to create a reflective post each day while all that information is still swimming in their heads. Ultimately, our crew did an amazing job of reflecting and sharing and I hope to use this model to promote other conferences that our school regularly attends. BTW, I use Posterous as the platform for blogging..... simple as email.

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.

Beyond Google

Search Terms: google cartoons

There are a bevy of search resources beyond Google.

OMG, he's using a bulleted PowerPoint and just yacking away. Where's the beef? Wow, he just taught us how to use quotes for search terms. Genius! Look, a cartoon on the screen.

This could possibly be the WORST conference session I've EVER been to. I thought we were going to learn some nifty advanced search strategies. Instead, we were subjected to a bunch of bulleted slides and screenshots.

OK Some options in Google Search -- Wonder Wheel, Timeline.

Tips
Use + and - in front of words to force their inclusion or exclusion
quotation marks around a phrase to make sure it is searched exactly as written.
Truncation or wildcards

GIMPin it Up!

GIMP similar to Photoshop but is free! http://www.gimp.org

Alien Faces - using Eye warping.

• select picture. Select rectangular button.
• draw square around face
• crop to selection
• Filters - distorts- Iwarp
• start with Grow tool
• deform radius 25-35
• click on forehead to stretch
• click OK.
• Eyeballs - filters - distorts -iwarp
• use horizontal slashes to make eyes bigger
• shrink in cheeks. use shrink instead of grow
  

selective colorization - color spot
uses layers. copy layer, turn copied layer bw. Colors, saturate. Eraser tool and erase bw layer. good exercise to understand layers better. find 6 pictures and colorize them.
txtechnogeeksrus.com

Cutout names - background pictures see through letters.
Ripples and Warps - simple, start with background.
Puzzle pieces
Lens flares - galaxies

Animoto - http://animoto.com
All about me slide show, take pictures of themselves.
Can use their stock imagery and music
Get and educator account
use for reflective activities
Showing a 30 second short clip using primary source images

Drop.io - https://drop.io
Use as a digital drop box for files. Teachers can set up a drop box
Live presentation feature - everyone in a lab logs into the drop and the teacher can script the content where all the computers can see it in real time.
Practical idea: Have you ever wanted to email a huge file to someone only to be rejected by the size limitation of your email program? Well, drop.io is a great solution for that. Just upload a file to the service, it will give you a link, paste that link in an email. When the recipient receives the email, they simply click the link to download the file. Magic!

Google Docs - http://docs.google.com
Using Google Forms to get feedback from students (Exit Ticket)
When the doc is collaborative, set up different sections within document for teams to work in.
Can set up a stand alone Docs account

Glogster - http://edu.glogster.com
Set up teacher account and assign student accounts - sign up before end of Feb. 2010 to have 200 student accounts.
Use as replacement for traditional posters.
Embed all kinds of media.
Student examples: Thomas Jefferson - lists information, pictures, videos, primary source documents
Student examples: Best friend glog with videos etc.
Great creative outlet
You can also embed a glog into a wiki to make wiki pages pop and provide more interactivity.

Cover It Live - http://coveritlive.com
Live blogging - students live blog President Obama's speech to students while teacher moderates comments. This would be a great way for students to share, in real time, thoughts and comments about an important event. I've used this in the past for live blogging PD sessions and the like, but I like the idea of bringing it to students wrapped around an event.

EduBlogs (this is a good one but if you really want to try blogging, I REALLY like Posterous - http://posterous.com
Create a teacher account and then have student blogs linked

Drawing in Word

Artsonia - http://www.artsonia.com
Post Showcase artwork online. Can be used as a fund raiser. Can purchase products with artwork, sell it and school gets 15%.

Animation Ideas
http://pptheaven.mvps.org
http://www.doink.com

Digital Citizenship
http://dcpartnership.wikispaces.com/Digital+Law
http://pwoessner.wikispaces.com/Digital+Citizenship
http://www.digitalcitizenship.net/Resources.html

Video Mania Program - video creation project that Bryan ISD does. I will contact them for more information.

I spent some time in the Blogger's Cave today having some interesting conversations about professional development. One idea that stuck with me was from a school district that implemented a technology diet. What exactly is a technology diet? Each month (or two months), with the principal's blessing and encouragement, a new technology tool would be introduced to the staff. The idea is to encourage the teachers to use this tool not in their classroom, but in their personal lives. The reasoning is simple: there are teachers who are resistant to using technology out of fear. However, many teachers can text message on their phones which requires a certain level of technology capacity. Why is that? Anecdotally, they found that if people use technology for their own personal use, they tend to adopt it more readily. If they can adopt some technology for themselves, they can maybe adopt it for their classroom. It's an indirect, soft sell approach that I like a LOT. Let the teachers play with a technology for a month and then see if the seed sprouts.

iPhone App Alert - My new favorite iPhone app! Dragon Dictation - it's FREE in the App store. Push a button, record your voice and it will transpose your spoken word into editable text, all with surprising accuracy. Once you get the text, you can copy it to an email or a text message. I LOVE this app!

Oh, and I spent some time showing Kerrie Gustin from Magnolia Posterous, my favorite blogging tool. BTW, you are reading a Posterous blog!

Paul R. Wood, my friend from Bishop Dunne in Dallas, brought me a cheeseburger today. He's a great guy to know. Someone said today that if you had to draw a picture of a best friend, it would look just like Paul. Deacon Paul is one of the most kind hearted people I know and it's an honor to call him a colleague and a friend.

Signing out now! More fun and intense learning tomorrow. Keep the comments coming. We love the feedback!

Hey everybody – it’s the second full day of TCEA 2010 and even colder than yesterday. They said that we might get snow or sleet today, but so far it’s just been rainy. Of course, the cold weather means that the meeting rooms are boiling hot, so that was fun.

My first workshop today was about using Comic Life to facilitate the writing process. Unfortunately, I thought that the writing process was going to be the focus and it wasn’t, using Comic Life was and I already know how to do that. It’s an awesome program though and they did showcase some neat projects and I picked up some program tips that I think the kids will really like.

You can check out the link to the presenters web page at http://staff.comalisd.org/mary.griffin/Tech_Tips_4_Teachers/TCEA_ComicLife_100342.html and see some of the projects that she does with her kids. We created a lab safety poster, a brochure about Texas, a comic about angles in everyday life, and a character study about a character in Charlotte’s Web. We do have a site license for Comic Life and it’s installed in both labs. If you want it installed in your classroom, just email help and someone will get it installed for you.

The next session that I had scheduled myself for started 15 minutes before my previous workshop ended and we didn’t end early, so I went to the exhibits instead. I did see some interesting products, but I’m not sure about pricing until I investigate further. I was looking for tools to differentiate math instructions, but most of the tools seem to start at the 6^th grade level and with pre-Algebra. Boo. I was looking for something for elementary and haven’t found it yet. I did, however, score a few free t-shirts and a laptop lock – so now I can apparently bolt my laptop to some type of surface if I wanted to.

I spent the rest of my day in sessions promoting the latest in Web 2.0 tools (shouldn’t we be on about Web 5.0 by now?) Holy smokes is there a lot out there – it’s almost overwhelming. The good news is that there is a lot of really cool, engaging, student-friendly, free stuff out there. The bad news is that there is A LOT of it. I’m going to include some links to the presenters websites so you can get a taste of what’s out there, but I foresee some staff development or Tech Tuesday sessions coming up to introduce all of the tools that we found this week.

First presentation was by Jim Holland and Susan Anderson (who are also Google Earth gurus) – they’re awesome if you ever get the chance to attend a workshop or session by them. You can check out their handouts at http://www.digitalgoonies.com The online presentation tools, in particular, will blow you away. Goodbye, PowerPoint – there’s a new sheriff in town.

Second presentation was by Randy Rodgers – he did 50 Web 2.0 tools in about 50 minutes – that’s why my head is spinning. Some of them are related or could be grouped – there are several tools that have presentation elements, photo editing elements, etc. I’ll really need to go through these and get a handle on what they can all be used for. The good news is that they’re all free and the students can usually figure them out quickly and easily.  His website is http://www.diigo.com/list/randyrodgers/tcea2010. You can either click on the links or click the “Play as Webslides” button in the upper right hand corner to start a slide show that will take you to each website. I can’t wait to check out Carrotsticks (http://www.carrotsticks.com/) – it’s an online math community where kids can log on and challenge each other to math competitions. The free version sticks them with addition only, but it looks like you might be able to get a free education account that adds more types of problems. The online timeline tools look awesome, too.

Tomorrow I’m hitting a workshops that focus more on technology applications and project-based learning. And, of course, trying to score more free stuff from the exhibitors – hopefully, I’ll have better luck tomorrow and get more than just pens and t-shirts.