#FallCUE Day2 Report

Well, the wifi seemed to be fixed for good and the lunch line was practically zero on Day 2, so I can give CUE and ACHS some props for at least fixing some problems quickly. Peter and I had selected our sessions late last night--we were ready to rock and our shared GDoc filled up fast with notes through the day. Next time I think I'll pick a time to have an empty session to run by all the vendors and see what's up quickly. This time we needed to maximize the info-grab. But a person can only process so much and implement so much each school year. 

Also for next time: sitting through keynotes and going to the meet ups before and after the con. 

In any case, here's what we saw and as always, notes are available upon request:

Session 6: CCSS Techie Tools
Padlet - digital posters for assessment. Don't need 1:1. I think I can use this one next semester for presentations and formative assessment. If you include an oral presentation piece it's even better. This could also be a strong tool in combination with QR codes at back to school night.
Audioboom - pod casting as class newsletter. Students write a script and record a podcast of what they've learned this week/unit. I think this was a public tool so train for your privacy needs. (No names on air, etc. )
Infuse Learning -- assessment tool much like socrative. Quite a bit of prep up front so I don't see this one on my radar until next year.

Session 7: Formative Assessment with mobile devices

Plickers and Edulastic-something as the two most reachable for me this year in public school with non 1:1

He covered a lot and they are linked in the resources. Plickers is a tool where only the teacher needs a device to use--each student (or each table group) has a paper card (which you could laminate for repeated use).  The cards are used for simple multiple choice selections, so there's a little bit of prep involved, and essentially what is happening is that your regular exit ticket or warm-up is now able to collect and display live data on who and how many in class are understanding the concept.  The teacher has a digital record immediately of each formative assessment, so that's appealing to me.  I could really use this in Special Education for IEP goal progress--the only down side is having to work around the multiple choice-style limitations.  So I wouldn't use this for every single problem each day.

Session 8: Special Education
This session was aimed at General Education teachers and getting them to use tech as a way to integrate Special Education students into the mainstream with tech as a facilitator.

An 8th grade teacher presented on student Blogging in lieu of written journaling--he said the majority of his students with special needs selected the online version and suspected it was due to not liking hand writing. Audio story problems were covered by an elementary teacher and I can see how I could use that in high school. Right now that would be a lot of extra prep for my class situation for a small number of applications. They presented a video produced by a student with autism to explain his condition. 

A nice thing about this session was that it was not focused on 1:1 and was presented by practical individuals in a situation that was closer to mine. So often I've been the only special educator in the room and even the only public school teacher in the room, or the only teacher at a school that's not going 1:1 iPads this year.

(Session 9 -- I skipped and dealt with some housekeeping issues)
Session 10: Science mobile
Since I'm co-teaching a Biology class this year, and I met Melissa Hero back at CUE Rockstar Tahoe, I had to go to this session and see what was up.  The link to her resources is where all the action is at.  By this point in the conference my entire brain was shot.  Melissa covered several websites to use for data sets in life science classes since most of the well known resources are for earth science (I didn't know this, but now I do!).  She covered several tools for elementary and for high school.  I can definitely see how to integrate the iNaturalist website/app into my class later this year. I'm definitely going to look at for next semester. 

iNaturalist.  Melissa Hero link.

#FallCUE Day 1 Report

On the first day of #FallCUE this is what we learned:
American Canyon had insufficient bandwidth for the number of educators and their devices on campus this morning.  By the afternoon, most problems were corrected--either people had logged off or connected to their phone's hot spot. (note: this was fixed by Saturday, I never found out what the issue was)
Past that glitch in the beginning, there was much to learn.  We went to 5 sessions and burned our brains out on google forms, scripts like form Ranger, green screen videos in the classroom, using add-ons to give students feedback on their writing, building my class website and embedding videos in google forms.

I loaded up on plenty of apps, twitter people to follow, and the real winner of the day was the number of new methods for giving feedback on student writing.
I found out that google classroom is only for schools with GAFE so it's not even worth looking at until I convince someone at my school to advocate the powers that be for that situation.

Session 1 was a run down on automating your work flow with formRanger and formMule scripts (scripts by Andrew Stillman) presented by @John_Eick. Here's a link to his resources which included a step-by-step screen shot of how to set up your documents and sheets.  Very useful for a teacher who is new to this type of thing.  This was the session where the wifi was the worst and got better at every session following this.  John was a really energetic presenter and even I, a relative expert on Stillman's old scripts, learned a few tricks to use in practice.

For session 2 and following, +Peter Hyland  and I split up to hit more sessions and because he had different goals for the PD since his classroom situation with technology is vastly different than mine.  I went to John Eick's next session on embedding videos in google forms and Peter went to the Hour of Awesome.
Embedding videos looks like a sweet way to have students take notes while watching a short video, then the teacher is able to quickly look at the notes and give some feedback on the quality of notes, etc. etc.  There are about 3 uses I thought of in my classroom and the only limitation would be technology access.  Could address that by "flipping" the model" and having those that are able do the video notes at home and others do it in class.  That method would require some planning for the kids not actively taking notes in the classroom.
Peter said the Hour of Awesome was awesome and his notes make it sound exciting. Ask me for the link and I'll share the notes with you.  It covered multiple Google products and a few of the case uses for each that could speed up repetitive teacher tasks and improve the speed of student feedback.

The theme of Day 1 was faster feedback to students.  The teacher has to do a little more time consuming prep and setup on the front end, however it's worth it so kids get a faster and better idea of how they're doing with anything from writing to math to biology notes.  Session 3 with +Kristina Mattis (@KristinaMattis)for me covered some add-ons in google docs that allowed collaboration, composition, editing, and publishing of student work with more modes than just text.  Session 4 with +Cate Tolnai (@CateTolnai) showed me some template examples of how to organize my course content around my class website.  This will be most useful to me this year and next.  Finally, I visited the green screen session and got another round of figuring out how to make some videos and--even more importantly--how to use this type of project in my classes to meet standards.

Overall, an awesome day for information.  The spotty wifi and long lunch line were not enough to dampen the good things soaking in to my brain.
More reports later.

CCSS and the Special Educator

I attended a training geared toward Special Educators that informed us all of the practical ways to implement the Common Core State Standards in Special Education.

I got some great links, such as a book I might check out that has sample goals for every standard (similar to the CARS+ goal banks)

http://www.amazon.com/Aligning-IEPs-Common-Core-Standards/dp/1578615488

The presenter, Dr. Donavan, pointed us to a few links with multiple resources for differentiating our instruction and for writing compliant IEP goals (and lessons that address those goals!) that align to the new grade level standards.

Here are two:

http://www.scoe.net/castandards/ -- line up of CST standards and CCSS

https://wiki.ncscpartners.org/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page -- lessons and resources from other states

We also got the good news that the CCSS goal banks will be ready in SEIS very soon! Also, an updated version of the CAPA test will be rolled out shortly for students that need alternate testing. (This can be found by going to the CDE website and looking for "alternate testing", however, I don't serve any students taking CAPA, so I didn't look for this)

Once again, at this training, I heard about Depth of Knowledge. I like it and need to apply the concept more deeply to my lessons. It is the third time I've heard of it at a training and seen the same graphic organizer:

Obligatory Depth of Knowledge Worksheet:

(This page is always followed by an activity where we examine all four levels more deeply by creating a differentiated lesson etc. etc. and share with the whole group)

There was quite a bit to digest and overall it was a good training.  This presentation eased my anxiety over implementing the CCSS in IEPs and (to a certain extent) implementing the CCSS in my classroom practice.  

I will link to his slide show when he posts it later this week.  I wish they would start posting those resources at the same time as the presentation so I could link to it right now.

I believe I have a much better understanding of how to use these in real life.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

My time this summer was productive and exciting.  Aside from exploring with my 2 year old son and bouncing my baby daughter around in the back yard, I have managed to get a little work done this summer as well.  This summer for me and my family has centered around food, swimming, and a little bit of professional development.  I owe a big thank you to my lovely wife for taking on the two children while I went to a 3-day long mid-week conference.

Computer Using Educators is a group of teachers who find awesome new ways to use technology in their lessons that make sense for the content and the lesson.  For example, on presenter showed us how he has his history students compose scripts for "news reports from history" and then quickly and easily films them and publishes them within a day.  The students can do most of the work, or just the history side of things, depending on how much tech you want the kids to touch during the lesson (or how much control you want the teacher to have).  I have linked to some of his videos in the posts below:

CUE Conference Day 1
CUE Conference Day 2
CUE Conference Day 3
My Class Website -- thanks to the CUE presenters for showing me some tricks!
Here's a link to my syllabus and,
a link to the rules and first assignments.

On my own, I started some coding at Codecademy (I mostly learned HTML5 and JavaScript). This blog background is Cascading Style Sheets that I learned at Codecademy.  Sadly, my class website and blog have very little on them right now, and may not during this first semester while I get things figured out at my new position.