Teacher 2 Teacher Conference Day 1
Well, what can I say. If I had to sum up the first day of the conference than I would have to say WOW! The organization and people there on hand to direct people to the different sessions, the quality of the presenters and presentations was excellent. It was a great use of my PD for this year!
Senator Gershaw has an excellent facility for hosting a conference of this type. We had morning announcements sent throughout the school via live streaming video from the school's TV studio complete with green screen. It had an excellent combination of Macs and PCs and everyone had a chance to practice the number of apps being showcased at the conference. Even when we were short of stations,we were encouraged to use our laptops on the wireless network generously provided by the school. All the workshop materials are even available for download after the conference. Pretty slick.
Anyways, I learned about how to do Digital Storytelling with a free app from Microsoft called Photo Story 3. Although many people would at first confuse this program with a Powerpoint presentation, it really is so much more than that. Students build photo essays using images, narration and music. It forces the students to really focus on the elements of storytelling, presentation, narration, planning, and pacing. I can't wait to try this program with my students.
Next session I attended was about using Wikis in the classroom and while we did end up talking about how we can use wikis in class, we also talked about many web 2.0 tools that are freely available to help make our teaching easier. Tom White our presenter was excellent and was obviously very passionate about using tech.
I also attended a great session on animation with Jim Hollis using the SMARTboard. Even though I have experience using smartboards I learned something new. I'll be sharing a lot of ideas with my colleagues when I return.
