ACTEM Mini-Conference

This year for ACTEM offered a mini-conference for a day during February vacation at the newly renovated South Portland High School. I collaborate with Alice Barr on a session on Enhancing Your Classroom using Google Drive and Kern Kelley on Empowering Students with Presentations, and Blogger for the classroom with tips on using Picasa and YouTube to portray learning in the classroom.

This is the updated presentation I included on Blogger in the classroom:

Coding in the Primary Grades

All students in grades 1-12 had an opportunity to participate in an "hour of code" activity that was appropriate to their grade level. First graders used the iPad app Kodable to explore the concepts of planning a sequence, using if/then options and learning to repeat commands. Following the Hour of Code week students have been asking to access the app as one of their options in the classrooms.

Second and Third grades used the coding activities posted at the Computer Science week learn to code page of tutorials. Several students were able to complete the activity, whether they finished or not they all had success with the logical thinking procedures that are the underpinnings of programmming.

This is a slide show of some students at Rowe using iPads and YES learning top program on their laptops with assistants from HMS:

Leveraging Learning Conference 2013

Leveraging Learning Conference 2013 - Auburn, ME

The Kindergarten teachers at Rowe School are writing a YEF (Yarmouth Education Foundation) grant to have two iPad in each classroom and the first grade teachers are in their second year of using four iPads in each classroom. Given that, we arranged for six registrations for the two and a half day conference with one hundred-fifty primary educators in Auburn, ME. We rotated teachers so that every teacher who was interested was able to attend for at least one day. These are the notes from the conference. We had several big "takeaways" from the conference. One was that we wanted to limit the number of apps we used and focus on using them for creative expression, not just rote learning.

MICDL Consultancy in Honduras, October 2013

This is the presentation that I prepared for faculty meetings to share the experience of spending a week with a consultancy team working with the Honduran Department of Education project on technology for learning and innovation.