It's 4:30 and I should still be in bed, but my head is swimming with so many worlds of awesome that I am excited to write about them.
I did not get to GAFE summit early, but at a normal time. Breakfast from Panera again. Man, those guys are awesome.
An Amazing Opening Keynote by Dan Russel, talking about the potential of students and technology and how much the world has changed. He mostly talked about the speed of knowledge and how we have all this new technology to create and dream. He talked about how knowledge has evolved and how we are all learning to do things sooo much faster than we used to.. like how finding information has changed so much since the days of the card catalogue and how difficult it often was to try and use that research method because it would take SO MUCH TIME! He talked about different languages, different learning styles, different modalities and it was all awesome. I could go on and on, but.. I had a next session to get to... and I was falling asleep in the theater. 1000 warm bodies in a auditorium without air conditioning makes Tory sleepy and sort of comfy. I started head-nodding.
We did get a neat thing on the way out of the the auditorium. Three apps, which I already have on my iPad, which you would have to pay for, but which are awesome for education. I highly HIGHLY recommend Explain Everything for creating videos. This is a great tool for a Flipped Classroom, and I think I will use it to practice lectures and such. I will definitely have to do a later blog post. Calling Can of Worms for now.
So.. Session 5 was pretty awesome. I went in because I wanted to earn my #gettinggeeky badge, and it was amazing. I also got to learn about the other side of campus! Monica Martinez (@mimg1225 ) gave a great presentation about all of the tips and tricks that you can use in Gmail. The session was so jam packed, she didn't even get into everything, but she did teach us about Undo sending with a 30 second send delay and Canned Responses, which are both amazing Google Labs. She also taught us that if you use the words "Attached is" or something similar and you forget to attach a something to that email, Gmail will remind you, which is great because I do stuff like that all the time. Then she taught us how to use www.qrstuff.com to make a QR code that you can use to put on things like syllabi or back to school handouts and such that automatically sets up an email for parents so that they can email you. And if they do, and if you put in a specific code, there is a way to make it so that by reading a specific code in the subject line of the email, it will take one of your canned responses and automatically send it to whoever sent you that code and archive the email that you were sent so that you will never have to see that email ever, which will save you a ton of time. There was just too much awesome to go around, so I highly suggest you visit Monica at her Google Site and check out all of the awesomeness that is there.
Session 6 was about Add-ons like Doctopus and gClassFolders and wow.. what an amazing way to use Google to set up a paperless classroom. Melissa Hero (@mdhero) had great things that you could do with these to help you manage your Google Drive with your students so that it is that much easier to get to everything and find it on your Google Drive. gClassFolder is definitely something I want to be using with my kiddos when we get back, as it will make things easier to use. It also sets up a folder where I can put stuff that I want my students to see but not edit. Then, using Doctopus, I can shoot every single student on my list an email that has a document attached, that also has their name already on it, which they can edit, which they send back, which I then can use Goobric to attach a rubric to an essay or handout or whatever, grade it online, send the student their grade with comments, and boom.. grading finished! Mind Blown! I know I keep using words like amazing and awesome, but really... I was in awe at how simple it was. So much to think about when school starts!
After a good, healthy lunch from Panera, I was full and I was warm, so Session 7 was a hard one for me to stay awake in. Fortunately, Monica Martinez had a lot of Apps that she showed us which will be helpful, so I managed to stay awake. In a blazing fast hour long session, she taught us about http://www.videonot.es/ which lets you annotate a YouTube video and jump to the specific place in the video that that annotation is at. Great for teaching students listening skills. She also showed us how to add videos to a Google Form so you can use that as an assignment and students can automatically put in responses which will be uploaded to a spreadsheet, making it easy to grade. And she showed us Screencastify which is a screen shot video creator so you can share with your students how to do something on a computer. Great for a class YouTube! Then there is Google Drawings, which is accessed from your Google Drive. And TextHelp, which I gushed about yesterday, but is still awesome, and Google Docs Story Builder. On her website, she also gives an example on how media affects people. It was amazing. Again with the Awe...
My last session of the conference was one I had been anticipating for the whole conference, and that was Karl Lindgren-Streicher and Victoria Olson's presentation on Passion Based Learning, Innovation Day and Genius Hour. Another can of worms that I think I will open up later, but it was amazing, and I can definitely see how it can be effective to let students choose what they will be learning about. I was floored at how simple and amazing they made it seem.
I didn't go to the ending keynote, mostly because I was exhausted and my brain was too full from all of the awesome that I had already learned. It still is!
Thank you to all the presenters, all the amazing awesome people from Stockton Unified District who went with me, and to all the coordinators of the GAFE summit. It was just amazing! I can't wait to use this in my classroom and start teaching other teachers how to use it!
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