Last summer I attended ISTE in San Diego, an international technology conference. I don't know if it was that the conference was so big that I was overwhelmed or that I just didn't pick the right seminars to see, but I didn't come away from the three days feeling like I hadn't learned very much that was practical and exciting to me.
I just spent five hours at the CUE Conference, and I feel like doing cartwheels. My brain is buzzing with all of these great new tools and ideas to take back into my classroom. I feel so instantly inspired being around all of these incredible, creative educators.
Here are some of the best things I took away from today:
Virtual Field Trips with Google Earth
I started the morning in a seminar taught by a 6th grade SDUSD social studies teacher where she whet our educational appetites with a taste of Google Earth. She engages her class by extending the meager social studies textbook with virtual field trips. She showed us how her class has visited Ancient Greece, the Great Wall of China, and the inside of the Great Pyramid of Giza through Google. The program allows her, as an educator, to link text, video and images to the virtual tour to bring the social studies textbook to life. She has also used the program to involve her students in teaching the standards. After a tutorial of how to use the program, she has her students work in cooperative groups to design virtual tours for their classmates on an assigned topic.
Think of the possibilities! A primary grade teacher in the seminar suggested using it to give her students a visual representation of the difference between a city, state, country and continent. A science teacher shared that she and her class use it to check tectonic plates for recent earthquakes and to track movement along fault lines. Google has mapped out the Titanic! I can use it to take a virtual tour of the California missions when my students are writing their reports. We can "visit" San Nicholas Island when we are reading Island of the Blue Dolphins. My fifth grade colleague in the seminar with me searched the site and already found a pre-made virtual tour of the Liberty Bell for her class.
I could feel myself smiling like an idiot throughout her presentation. As soon as I finish this post, I will be playing on Google Earth until my coworkers drag me out to dinner.
I've heard of Edmoto before, but hadn't really had the time or inclination to learn more about it on my own. I met an Edmoto representative in the convention center vendor area and was quickly sucked in. In a nutshell, Edmoto is a social media website build for schools and teachers. A teacher can create a class page where he or she can post discussion questions, quizzes, videos, and more. Students are assigned their own user names and can respond to discussions, answer questions and pose new questions to each other. It's basically an amped-up wiki space that seems to be very user friendly.
I think all teachers are suckers for school supplies and classroom products. Naturally, inside the convention center they had a big vendor faire set up pushing teacher "crack" (curriculum books, flashcards, games, manipulatives, etc.). We found this awesome game called Mathological Liar (2-4 players). Each student gets a "case file" card with a math "whodunit" word problem on it. Each card has the same problem on the front, but on the back of the individual cards are suspect names and clues. Each student reads their suspect clue on the back of the card aloud, and by using the clues given in the case file and the suspect clues, students try to figure out which suspect committed the mathematical crime.
Well, all in all, I had a very productive first day. With all of the work stress and school stress I've been under lately, this conference was just what (I didn't know) I needed to reenergize me in the classroom.
I'll be back tomorrow with more technology goodies!
Miss H.
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