TeachMeet KY Learning Takeaways

Finally the day came yesterday for me, the opportunity to experience my first unconference type gathering. Will King (@wkingbg) and Allen Martin (@AlsTechTime), both whom I met at ISTE, invited me to crash their Bowling Green school district Teach Meet. As I followed their keynote speaker, Adam Taylor (@2footgiraffe), from Nashville, TN to Bowling Green, KY, I wondered if the event would seem awkward given that I was not a Bowling Green public school teacher. However when I walked into the Bowling Green High School, I was pleasantly surprised not to experience a moment of awkwardness. Actually quite the opposite happened, the teachers were so kind and welcoming. Our shared passion for learning and teaching completely blurred the fact that I was not a teacher in their district.

The Newscasts for Any Classroom was a wonderful session. Janet Martin walked us through the steps of setting up and implementing the project. Working in groups, students would learn how to plan and write/storyboard a segment of a newscast. The newscast would include a lead story, other stories, weather, commercials, traffic, etc. The integrated tech piece involved using iMovie to film and edit their production. I am going to attempt to use this idea with my explorer unit. So instead of individually presenting one by one about their explorers, groups of explorers will create one newscast. I can only imagine the creative student productions that will transpire!  Janet's SlideRocket presentation can be found at www.tinyurl.com/TMnewscast. As part of her resources, Janet also shared this great clip on storyboarding to show students.

As I walked out of the newscast session, Kim Calhoun (@CalhounDOwork), a 9th grade history teacher, approached me about some cool ideas she had in her classroom.  In her classroom, she began pulling amazing student projects out of a box. At the moment, the cardboard boxes seemed more like treasure boxes to me. Kim had her students create War World II poster foldables. I immediately started to think of the different ways I could use her ideas with my own students. She generously gave me a sample to take with me. I now plan on using foldables with my American Revolution unit. I keep hearing and reading that "learning should be a hot mess." Well, nothing screams "hot mess" more than a classroom full of students with paper, scissors and glue!

          

Infographics is a tool I have not yet used, but I totally see the platform as an opportunity for students to effectively show their understanding. So, I was pleased to learn the basics from Will King's session on how to help kids sort and organize data. I loved the simplicity and visually appealing graphics of this image Will shared with us.

I plan to use this tool early on in the school year as a culminating geography unit project. I am leaning toward using http://www.easel.ly/ which is still on my summer learning "to do" list.

Adam Taylor's session on engaging students with technology was full of practical and easy to use tools. I was particularly glad to get a Socrative overview since I plan on using this assessment tool with my students this year.

As I left the session of how to embed Web 2.0 tools into a web page, Ms. McCoy, took me to a back room to show me their green screen. I was amazed, I wish we had this set up at our school. I was completely impressed by how cleverly an iPad box, an 8 x 10 frame glass, and velcro became a stand/holder for an iPad to film productions.

Overall, my first Teach Meet was a day full of learning, a total success. I can't wait for my next unconference. Now I understand the excitement that runs through Twitter as people tweet about the unconference craze.