ISTE 2012 Day One
Three sessions in the morning led me to spend the afternoon in the Bloggers Cafe and resting up.
First up was Use Technology to Improve Teaching Elementary Mathematics, which featured the MathLanding.org site. It’s a curated site put together by a partnership that included Maryland Public Television. I’ve liked some of their past work, so I gave it a whirl. Poor WiFi (and spotty LTE for me) made the presentation a dud from the BYOD point of view, but the presenter did persist in at least outlining the site to participants in a way that made it relevant to me as a classroom educator. It is essentially a curated site of links on mathematics topics for both teacher and student resources, searchable by subject, grade-level and Common Core standards, similar to Thinkfinity, etc. No final verdicts on this yet, as I still need to investigate the site further. It does look promising, and I will need resources for my sixth grade students next year.
Since the technical difficulties were limiting the MathLanding session, I ducked out to a nearby session in the BYOD hall in the CUE room which featured “CUERs”. Jon Corippo was starting a demo of Powerpoint Karaoke, and it rocked. The idea in the original is that you give someone a random deck with a few slides, and they have to present extemporaneously. Jon showed how he modified this to do a quick assessment on student learning. You show students a slide of a picture related to something you’ve been studying, like vocabulary, a historic event, etc. and they have to speak to the slide. These are the basics and how you would prepare them and train them in the procedure will vary, but it was intriguing.
After the opening of the vendor floor (OVERWHELMING — I ducked in, grabbed a couple things of schwag, and ran out), I attended a session on AndroidPoweredProjects. They showed geo-tagging of photos and a GPS app, My Tracks from Google, that could be used for creating maps and paths as they suggested. I’m going to see if it’s “granular” enough for geo-caching. Next was making a stop motion using a phone based app called ClayFrames. Finally, video editing on the fly and your tablet/phone with video editor. The handout listed an app called AndroMedia video editor, but there are others.. The room had ~180 seats and while not SRO, it was full. This shows that folks are starting to use the more reasonably priced Android devices, and there is a demand out there for iPad alternatives.
