Tuesday was another learning packed day. We started the day with the keynote speaker who was great. Her name is Jennie Magiera and she is a tech coordinator for a school district on the south side of Chicago. Her message was that teachers are wizards and is capable of finding genius in every child. Our next stop was to Tech4Learning booth in the Expo Hall where we presented. We showed fellow educators how we use Wixie with our classes in the computer lab. We had examples of the many projects that we have created in Wixie over several years. It was well received and we are going to collaborate with them again in August with a Back to School blog in the Creative Educator online magazine. Throughout the day we tried to make our way through the aisles of the Expo Hall. Some of our favorite things were:

Edmodo now has a free feature called "askmo.edmodo.com"- Boost your IQ. It is a collection of the millions of videos, articles, etc. that the users have posted.There is not as much for the younger learners but it is an endless resource for the Intermediate and Middle School teachers.

Pen Pal School was a great organization that links your class with a class in another country. They do the leg work for you and it can be a wonderful way for your class to connect with the world.

Google Expeditions is a resources to use with ipads that provides information about unlimited places in the world. It is free and has several QR codes that we can share if you are interested.

We found several resources for our first grade classrooms that we are excited to put to use.

We ate lunch with Joe and he is having a great conference. He has made great contacts and is full of ideas for our school and the lab. He is ready to get back and hit the ground running.

We were invited by Tech4Learning to join them for dinner. We brought Joe with us for dinner at Casa Rio on the Riverwalk. I think Joe enjoyed talking to some of the people there who were able to gove him some good advice.
The three of us walked to the San Fernando Cathedral in the Main Square of San Antonio for their light show. It was awesome! They project lights up onto the front of the cathedral and with the lights and music they tell the history of San Antonio. I will drop a picture into the blog when we get home. It is hard to describe how neat it was.
From there we headed to the Aztec Theater for the annual EdTech Karaoke night. As always, it was an interesting event. We stayed to hear the finalists and see a librarian from Georgia win singing Proud Mary. A good time was had by all!!

We are headed back to the convention center this morning for more before we head out to the airport. We will pass along more of our finds when we get home and organize our minds and papers.

Monday finds at ISTE 2017

Here is a picture of our poster session

We checked out some early morning poster sessions before we had to set up for our second go round of presenting. We had over 300 handouts and 250 business cards given out last
night.  We had to go to FedEx to have more handouts printed out for today's session.

We met a lot of fellow teachers and another Jeannine who worked with ISTE. We also became friends with Dr. Roland Rios who was the head of the poster sessions for ISTE.  His is the district technology director for Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio  We plan to follow him on twitter.


One take away was kinder-steam which  used Kodable which is programming for kids and BreakoutEDU which is a learning game platform.

There is a lot of emphasis on STEAM projects at ISTE this year.  Here are a few sites that were given to check into-- CodeSpark with the Foos (game based visual coding) Tykerfor Kids (block coding)
Code Combat (for older students)
One that we are very interested in looking into is called STREAM which integrates a book of your choice with STEM projects that you could create related the particular book. She used Henry's Freedom Box as an example of how to blend the two together. After reading the book you could ask a question such as how big did the box that Henry hid in have to be. After discussion, you could assign a task of creating a box for a crayon or pencil and provide paper, tape and scissors. Fun idea to run with.

One free sites that we found in the expo hall was BRAINY.  This is a site of students helping students with their homework questions.  We also discovered  classtag which is free.  It is a personalized communications with parents.  It is easy tool to set up scheduling,

One of a visitor at our session suggested to us  Justbooksreadalound which is similar to One More Story but free! The books are listed by the length and there are over 700 books available. (Some of voices for the stories are on the annoying side, but it is free.)

We scored free t-shirt at VELOCITY which is a program that is for  monitoring student understanding and instantly adjusting based on student performance. It is a fee based program.   Here is a link to its sight velocity.

We will post later tonight some great Joe finds on his first ISTE experience!  He looked a little tired and dazed this afternoon. He went up to take a nap.
Tomorrow we hope to find  some more exciting resources to share.  Today was a super busy day for us. Presenting took four hours of our day so we are anxious to get in a full day of learning tomorrow.
We do present at the Tech4Learning expo booth tomorrow about Wixie as we had to re-schedule it as we were double booked.

Here we go!

Joe has arrived and in a little while we will be heading out to the conference.  We have enjoyed seeing the sites around San Antonio.  We have been scorched by the hot sun and drenched by the occasional rain bursts.
We picked up our packets and did some research on what sessions we are going to go to tomorrow.  ISTE has gone totally digital--to finding sessions to locating yourself  in the conference area and giving you directions on your phone how to get there. IMAGINE that totally online!

Having issues uploading pictures right now from our session today.  I will try again tomorrow.  ISTE came around early and asked if we would present again tomorrow from 11:00-1:00. We had to postpone presenting at Tech4Learning until later in the day.

We will be looking out for some great ideas to share.  Hopefully we will find many things for all of you.

A few days away!

It is just a few days away from  heading our way to ISTE.  The bag is packed with all of our session materials.  We have examples of ways to connect to the world plus tons of resources to share with all of our fellow teachers.    Just in case you would like to follow us on twitter we will be tweeting along the way too!

Talk to you soon!  

Ways to connect to ISTE

JUNE 25-28, 2017

In a few short weeks we will be off to  present and learn at ISTE.  We are excited to be representing St. Pius again this year.   We will have two sessions.  The first one is on Sunday, opening night.  Our second presentation will be on Monday at the Tech 4 Learning booth giving ideas of using Wixie in the primary grades.

You can follow us on our blog, but you can also follow ISTE with the following links below.

Last year when I did not attend I joined in the fun by using the link created by Jen Wagner #NotAtISTE17. I followed Tony Vincent on periscope highlighting various sessions and poster sessions too.  Maybe we will be lucky and he will stop by our session on Sunday night!

ISTE has also given out ways to connect if you are interested.  Here is the link to that page.  It has various ways to connect.

https://www.iste.org/explore/articleDetail?articleid=372&category=ISTE-Connects-blog&article=4+ways+to+attend+ISTE+2017+virtually+%E2%80%93+pssst,+they%E2%80%99re+free