The only thing that I love more than discovering a powerful educational technology tool is sharing this resource with other educators. During my first year of teaching at River Valley, I joined the technology team. One year later, I became head of the committee and ran monthly "Tech Tuesday" sessions where I shared all of the resources that I had discovered and implemented into my own classroom (such as BreakoutEDU, Quizizz, Quizlet Live, Kahoot, Padlet, GoFormative, Schoology, and more). After a year of delivering in-house Professional Development (PD), I began to present at professional conferences in Michigan. See below to view details of the sessions I presented.
The Lake Michigan Technology Conference (LMTC) held its first conference on July 24th-25th, 2017 in Coloma, Michigan. The purpose of this conference is for K-12 educators in Southwest Michigan to share educational technology resources that demonstrate innovation. During this conference, I presented three different sessions.
My first session, titled "Formative Review Tools: Quizlet Live, Kahoot, and Quizizz" offered a hands-on look at three similar tools. To make this session interactive, I presented each tool one-by-one, discussed its unique features, and had the participants experience each of the features first-hand by playing a sample Quizlet Live/Kahoot/Quizizz game. After each tool was discussed, I asked participants to determine how each tool could be used within their own classrooms.
The second session that I presented at LMTC was a BreakoutEDU presentation. To engage participants right away, I did not explain the concept of BreakoutEDU before having them experience a BreakoutEDU game for themselves. During game play, I took on the role of the teacher and modeled how to serve as a BreakoutEDU proctor while the participants unwittingly took on the role of a student participating in the game. After time was up, participants reflected on their experience. At the end of the session, I shared tips to be a successful BreakoutEDU proctor and some resources.
In addition, I had a third session titled "Create Digial BreakoutEDU-Esque Challenges with Google Forms" that was so highly received that I was encouraged to present this session in the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning (MACUL) conference the next year. See more information on this session below!
The Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning (MACUL) conference took place on March 7th-9th, 2018 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. MACUL's mission is to help educators use technology to create strong pedagogical practices.
During this session I had participants jump right into this hands-on session by completing a sample digital BreakoutEDU challenge in groups of five. After experiencing it for themselves, I then showed participants how to create their own challenges using Google Forms. Towards the end of the session, I shared resources and gave participants an opportunity to create their own challenges using Google Forms.
The Lake Michigan Technology Conference (LMTC) held its second conference on July 23rd-24th, 2018 in Coloma, Michigan. During this conference, I presented four different sessions. Below are two of these presentations.
For the past three years, I have been gamifying my classroom; this session serves as a way for me to share my expertise and resources with others. Since the topic of this session is "Gamify Your Classroom," I decided to gamify the PD session. After each gamified element in the presentation, I will directly model that strategy and have teams of participants compete against each other. For example, after learning about badges, groups will compete to create the most creative badge to earn XP (experience points). The group that has the most XP at the end of the PD session wins a prize!
I discovered Twitter Chats while taking CEP 810, my first course in the Master of Arts in Educational Technology (MAET) program. Since Twitter has been such a game changer in terms of growing my Professional Learning Network (PLN), I wanted to share this resource with others. This PD session is interactive; after explaining the benefits of Twitter Chats and explaining the norms of the chat, participants will be immersed in a live mock Twitter Chat.
During this session, I will share four unique ways to have students complete a research task that go beyond the stereotypical research paper. Two of the methods include having students compile research together on a Google slide deck and creating a blog post instead of a formal essay. Many examples (both from the teacher and the student end) will be shared for each type of research.