Sunday, July 31, 2011

Building Learning Communities Conference 2011


'My students watching Marcos Torres Keynote at BLC 2011.'

Another Building Learning Communities Conference has now come and gone with a slew of amazing presentations, conversations, and ideas. There's too much to unpack here, but I think what surprised/encouraged me the most was people talking about education and using the word love. At least three speakers spoke of love, not in the abstract context of a teacher loving their job or subject area, but how when educators passionately love learning (and working with children) the rest will follow. For my part I discussed district wide implementation of Google Apps for Education and Students as Tech Support.

Unquestionably the coolest thing that happened was presenting with one of my students, Kris Redman. He really knocked it out of the park talking with educators about having students help teachers with technology. In fact, after the session while I was picking up, he convinced TechSmith representative Dave McCollom to give copies of Camtasia to our entire high school!

I'm very proud of him and need to let Dave know that Kris won't be available for employment for a few years yet. :)

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Summer Tech Institute 2011


The Summer Tech Institute was a great experience for me this year. I was able to work with a terrific group of people. We covered a lot of ground during the week and I'm looking forward to the seeing the projects that the groups begin coming to fruition in the upcoming year.




I ran the Google Tools strand and you can find all that we covered here: www.tinyurl.com/googlesti

Also, http://wbxapp.com/summer-tech is the Mobile Web App one of my students created for the conference.