Collaborative ACTEM Post

The tech integrators from RSU #20 all made the trip to Augusta for the 2014 ACTEM conference.  Presented by the Association for Computer Technology Educators of Maine, this two day conference at the Augusta Civic Center is probably the state's largest gathering of teachers, IT staff, and even students for the purpose of discussion the role of technology in teaching and learning.  We attended some pretty great sessions, and we thought we would discuss each of our takeaways from the conference in this post.

Geoff:  I attended two sessions during ACTEM on staff professional development (pretty deep, attending professional development about professional development, right?), one session relating to models of delivering PD and the other to actually delivering it.  The clear message from both sessions was that every tech decision must be mission-driven.  Technology is useless as a tool if it is used for its own sake; there must be a larger instructional, pedagogical, district-wide or professional goal that it can tie into.  And these decisions need to be made at every level.  Teachers need to make decisions about how technology will support their classroom goals, and IT must maintain the infrastructure and to and make purchasing decisions that support those goals.  And tech integrators must navigate both worlds.  The problem that we as tech integrators face is that there are not enough of us to go around; we could probably double our staff and there still wouldn't be enough of us to serve the needs of all of you.  So, I'll be looking to alternative forms of professional development, including modules that can be accessed online and on your own time, to better serve your needs.  As integrators, we have discussed the use of Atomic Learning for that platform, and I would like to explore it further.

Finally, at Thursday's keynote, it was emphasized that the technology tool is not as important as the learning done with that tool.  So what technologies should we be utilizing?  Richard Byrne, the keynote speaker, said, "The ones that do this:"

Liz:
One of the sessions I attended was Google Classroom with Kern Kelly.  From that I brought away a terrific video from a webinar showing exactly how to set up a Google Classroom with both the student view and the teacher view.  This is something that I will share with the teachers at BAHS.  The video is about 34 minutes long.  The link is http://youtu.be/7CI_H29AlrA

I also attended a round table session where I saw demonstrated some great applications.  I came away with four applications that would work great for BAHS, all of which need 1-1 and two need ipads.

Socrative--Student Response System, similiar to clickers.  Educators can initiate formative assessments through quizzes, quick question polls, and exit tickets all with their Socrative app. Socrative will instantly grade and provide graphs of results to help you identify opportunities for further instruction.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/socrative-student/id477618130?mt=8

Baiboard -- Collaborative Whiteboard - Multi-user collaboration on PDF docs in real-time using on iPad.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/baiboard-collaborative-whiteboard/id490534358?mt=8

Explain Everything  -- Shows some of the same features as Doceri but somewhat limited.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/explain-everything/id431493086?mt=8

EduCanon-- Interactive video where you can embed questions for the students to answer within the video

https://www.educanon.com/ 

I also visited one vendor that was demonstrating 3D printers.  He is going to be around the state demonstrating this equipment to schools and when he is in our area he will notify me and some teachers that are interested in 3-D printing can attend his demonstration.  It was tremendous what the bigger machine could do.  It made working gears and adjustable wrenches while I was there.