Conference Time!

Conferences are a great time for teachers to focus on learning, network with other professionals, and develop their teaching craft. However, teachers are not limited to attending a conference if they are not able to or if a budget does not allow. Due to the ability to access an almost infinite amount of information online, teachers can professionally develop anywhere and anytime. These are a couple conference videos I found useful from the Future of Education Technolgy YouTube Channel.

The first video is "Tools You Can Use Tomorrow" (40:22) https://youtu.be/6sGI2JiQjIg by Leslie Fisher from the 2015 Future of Education Technology Conference. This speaker highlights various tools within our computers or online that teachers can use immediately. She shows different screen sharing tools that your students can access seeing your screen or each other's screens when collaborating. One tool I like is the https://recordit.co website. This website allows you to record your screen and your audio while you interact with your computer. In my head, I am thinking that this would work very well in a blended learning classroom, where students can access different lessons taught by me, or access different videos that show students step by step how to complete a task. There are not many steps that would need to be taken to use this. Teachers would just need to access the website and download the program. Once the program is downloaded teachers can start recording right away! Another tool is called www.screenleap.com which allows for you to broadcast your screen live onto other student's devices. One suggestion she gave that I love is that if a student is not in the room, whether due to behavior or needing a brain break they can still see the lesson live as you teach it. It is free with limited access, and the next membership does cost $15 a month for membership, but they offer educational discounts and some schools may offer to cover the cost due to it being a classroom tool.

The second video is called "Student-Centered Classrooms Linked by Google Suite" (40:56) https://youtu.be/Dr5T1ale_1s by Bill Parsons, also from the 2015 Future of Education Technology Conference. This speaker highlights tools to enhance student-centered learning with different tools on Google Drive. Now I have heard how amazing Google classroom tools are, but have not really taken the time to try it out or access it. A Google classroom is a great way to organize your classroom and students have Google drives to store their online work. Google slides allow students to access their work anytime and can collaborate with others and the teacher anytime. It allows the teacher to comment and students to interact with their slides, and gives students some freedom to collaborate. The speaker also highlights blogger, for students to create their own blogs. This speaker posts student’s blogs as the blog of the week as positive reinforcement, which I think is a great idea. All these sites are free and have a simple interface to learn from. Educators trying these out may need to do some exploring and I would advise spending some time understanding how to use each element before trying to implement it in your classroom. Overall, the great thing about Google Classroom/Suite is that it adds the networking element to your classroom. Students can access vital classroom information, work on documents, slides, blogs, and much more, and receive and give comments to build a collaborative environment. The biggest thing is all this is not limited for students to access in the classroom!

These are just a couple examples of conference videos that educators can access. There are so many more! Educators can now professionally develop anywhere and at any time. The information is out there, you just need to access it.