This past week I had the opportunity to attend KySTE. The theme this year V2V Vintage to Virtual. I chose the Vintage sticker for my name tag. Afterall – I went through high school and college without the internet, much less Google. My favorite game in the early 80s was River Raid on my Atari 2600. I learned to type on a dinosaur computer – that had to be booted with a 5 1/2 floppy each class. I remember the very first email I ever sent. It was my 2nd year in the classroom. I bought my first desktop – with a CDRom when I graduated college. My 1st phone was a Motorola Flip in 1997 – I had 30 minutes of talk for $29.95 a month. I still have my iPod Nano.
There were plenty of other vintage teachers there – one had been in education for 42 years! Wow. – but I can actually say, it was the first time at a conference I looked around and saw the age differences. Though I still have a few years left – I pride myself on trying to stay abreast of new ideas – reading, research and planning new tasks to keep my classroom fresh with up to date learning opportunities for my learners.
One thing I really learned at KySTE – that I must write my notes. It is unbelievable when I pause and try to remember the things from each session. It actually bothers me. I made the choice to type my notes – it was a tech conference after all. And I regret it. Even looking at my typed notes – there are details that I missed. Lesson learned. Never again. I will drag out my trusty graph paper composition notebook and write all that I want to remember.
I had 3 goals before attending:
- Literacy – being a part of our ALM Team this year made me want to bring home some ideas to build on those strategies; maybe find some tools to impact my efforts in developing better opportunities.
- Google Classroom – I have been utilizing Classroom for about 1 1/2 years now – but I felt that I could learn more – to become more effective and efficient with it.
- Math – always my top priority of course, but only a handful of sessions with a secondary math focus. There were actually 2 sessions on Desmos, but one was a beginners level and the other was using for 3D printing – which I do not have.
I plan to post a summary of the resources and sessions I took away. But my big idea – I wanted to get into a post – as a reminder to myself – why not create generic forms utilizing my most used Literacy Strategies, exit tickets, reflection prompts? I could quickly push these to the students in their classroom as needed during the class and access their responses quickly as time allowed. Maybe even share their responses with the class somehow.
However, part of my is hesitant – after the realization that my written notes are not as effective for me. Will the same be true if my students are creating their responses typed into a form as opposed to a written post-it or other physical form?
the radical rational... 