ISTE put out "4 ways to attend ISTE 2018 virtually - pssst, they're free!" a couple of weeks ago. The article has some good suggestions, but as someone who has personally been an active participant in the #notatiste community the past two summers, I want to share the tips and tricks that have gotten me the most out of ISTE without being there.
I will get to attend ISTE this year and won't have time to actively participate in the Not at ISTE community this year due to that, but I will do my best to tweet out resources and information from sessions/speakers I attend using #iste18 and #notatiste.
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Anytime, Anywhere After recently writing about Ditch Summit and after having time to try out Microsoft Education a bit more, I want to share about some professional development and online certification opportunities that can be done anytime and anywhere. I know I've already mentioned how to become Flipgrid Certified, which might have actually been my first online certification with educational technology. I know that several other educational technology platforms/softwares/etc. have similar certifications. (Side note - some of those cost money, and personally I feel like they should all be free. Now I realize some of them are only $10, but educators are already buying PD books, school supplies, etc. out of our own pockets. Plus if educators like your product and see it positively impacting their students, they'll spread the word to other teachers. Why charge a fee? Needless to say, I stick to the free ones.)
Let me preface by saying that Ditch that Textbook Digital Summit ends in 4 days on Dec. 31! So if you're reading this before the videos go offline, head over there ASAP to view the ones that call out to you. (You can always go to Matt Miller's main site too after his summit is over.)
Online professional development can be such a great way to learn from the comfort of our own homes. I typically prefer in person PD and conferences, but sometimes those aren't in the cards (like when I was on maternity leave and taking care of a newborn this past summer). Plus online PDs can broaden your horizons, as they're sometimes national or global in scale. I started getting into online PD back with EdCamp Global a few years ago (they've since changed their name to EdChange Global), and then I got into EdCamp Voice and NotAtIste the past two years. I would highly recommend all 3 of those and have learned from each of them and plan to participate in them again. All three of them are highly interactive and have so many options for how to be involved and what you want to learn about. These interactions also provided me with so many new, amazing educators to follow and connect with via Twitter. These online PDs also introduced me to some of my favorite educational technology tools that I still use (Flipgrid, Piktochart, Canva, etc.) as well as expanding my thinking and creating open dialogue around topics key to education. That being said, I find webinar-esque PD to be rather hit and miss, and recently I stumbled upon a tweet by a fellow teacher in my district about Matt Miller's Ditch that Textbook Digital Summit. I figured I could listen to some of them during some of my holiday season driving, and I'm SO glad I saw that tweet. At the time I'm writing this, I've already listened to 4.5 of the 9 (I need to go back and finish some obviously). I want to dive into the two that have stayed with me the most so far and some of my takeaways. I've been testing, vetting, and curating digital resources since my first year of teaching in 2010. I was a brand new teacher in a 7th grade ELA classroom that was one to one with desktop computers. I wanted students to use those computers for typing essays and answers, sure, but I wanted them to use them for so much more. I saw so much potential. So that's when my search for free and high quality educational resources for students began. That was also right after teachers all across the state had gotten laid off the spring prior. There was not money for subscriptions, and first year teachers don't make a lot of money.
A few years later I became a technology leader in my building along with one of my friends and colleagues. We helped teachers see uses for our schools iPad cart, trained them on how to use them, found apps that they could use with their students, etc. That's when I started becoming a leader in educational technology. I saw how colleagues didn't always have the time or technological savvy to find resources or know how to use them. I wanted to help them. A year or two ago I decided to up my game with my professional Twitter account and grow my PLN. Why? Because I saw how many resources people were sharing. I had been saving This past winter my building was allotted funds to spend on technology improvements. We decided to spend a little over half of those funds on collaboration stations and the rest on starting a makerspace. (See how I planned the makerspace here and what we started with in it here.)
One of the educational technology tools I heard the most about this summer has been Flipgrid. I'd been meaning to check it out, and ISTE finally gave me the final push to sign up for a free version account.
Then, as chance would have it during ISTE, Matt Frattali Periscoped Jennifer Casa-Todd's talk on her Social Leadia book (which sounds amazing), which led me to Matt's Twitter and serendipitously to Vedchat, which he founded. I jumped at the chance to try out Flipgrid from the contributor's/student's end and responded to their week 9 post about ISTE reflections, and I've also responded to their week 10 post about Educational Leadership. (You can check out the current topic by going to www.vedchat.com.) When I first got ready to record my response for week 9, I had at least 4 redos until I was okay with it. I absolutely hate being filmed! But then the Vedchat community encouraged me to not overthink my posts, to just film once, and to add my Twitter handle as my name so we could follow each other. Genius! It's hard to not be overly critical of our own responses, but we need to remind ourselves that we are our own worst critics, and other people care more about our ideas and our contributing than they do about if we stumble over a word or took too long of a pause. |