This is a guest post written by Jenny McNew, Media Specialist at Talahi Community School. Do you need a scholarship to attend a conference?  Apply today! 

This year I attended the TIES Conference in Mpls titled: Just IMAGINE. The conference began each day with guest speakers. Jaime Casap on Monday and Kimberly Bryant on Tuesday. Kimberly is the founder of Black Girls CODE. Jaime has worked for Google for many years and was very inspiring as he talked us through the changes that have happened in technology. His message that education disrupts poverty and education equals success spoke to me as I reflect on how we teach students what being educated actually means and what learning looks like today. He also talked about how we must come to a certain peace with the past and move forward in the future.

At this year’s conference, it was easy to imagine yourself as a learner. This conference has evolved from a technology conference to a learning conference and it presented me with some great takeaways personally and also things that I could share with my staff.

I attended two sessions that Leslie Fischer presented and every year I am amazed at her techiness and practicality for both teachers and learners. Her first session I attended was on virtual reality. Although it is a cool tool, in my current position I’d have to figure out how to implement it. But I did attend a poster session on Google Street View which brought some of the things out that Leslie had talked about and I think that would be more doable in a small group setting. Leslie’s session on Tools You Could Use Tomorrow gave me a wealth of information and great resources to not only teach with but just things to make any job easier.

I also attended a session on MakerSpaces. We have been having some issues just trying to make our MakerSpace more effective and efficient for all involved. It allowed me to step back and reassess how we want to go about providing that space for students.

In the afternoon I attended Stop motion Math for Elementary. This was a great session, and as a school with one-to-one iPads, we can begin right away. Students can show what they know while engaging with technology.

The session I attended on computer science and math brought me back to Scratch. Many years ago when I first got interested in technology it was Scratch that made me realize how much fun coding was. It’s funny how we always go forward sometimes with the better bells and whistles and yet the things that really caught our interest bring us back to the grassroots of why we really enjoyed something. I look forward this year to working with Scratch with kids again and using it in a mathematical way while teaching computer science. Scratch 3.0 can be used on iPads and will be a great addition.

We had the pleasure of meeting the CEO and team from Edji.it which is a program that allows students to interact with text. We are always looking forward to ways to interact with technology and literacy.

I presented again this year at the conference in the playground on playful learning. I brought some new cool technologies that reminded me with students sometimes it’s about the Play – Yay! I purchased Turing Tumble which really pushed students to problem solve and think through binary operations. It was created by Paul Boswell from Minnesota. There was a lot of interest in this non-tech simulation and I know my students really like it.

I also did some learning myself with the augmented reality app Quiver. I’ve already brought that back and used it with some students. You get to do some pretty cool things with the 3D shapes that come off the page.

Thank you CMLE for having your scholarship program.