This is a guest post written by Rachel Miller, Instructional Technology Specialist at Sartell Middle School. Do you need a scholarship to attend a conference? Apply today!
This year was the second time I attended the TIES conference, but it was my first time attending as an Instructional Technology Specialist focused on supporting teachers in their technology integration journeys, as opposed to attending as a classroom teacher. As such, my favorite takeaways from this conference were those that I knew I could share with my colleagues for use in their classrooms.
I attended sessions that might be of interest to the language arts teachers in my building, including sessions on podcasting, engagement tools, and media literacies. I’m excited to further explore and encourage the use of PearDeck in the classroom to increase student interaction while using slideshows. It was a tool that I was vaguely familiar with before attending TIES, but I had not had extensive experience with it. The work time provided during the session allowed me to explore the tool in a much deeper way. I am excited to use it and introduce it to teachers!
In thinking about how to apply lessons and concepts learned at TIES to my work, I am aware that I need to fight the urge to immediately share new ideas with colleagues. Instead, I will strategically try to incorporate ideas and strategies through conversation and planning in order to best meet staff where they are at currently. Overall, I found this conference to be rewarding and energizing for my own professional development.
I am grateful to the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange for their support of my professional endeavors!
Two of my favorite sessions were on the design thinking process and problem-based learning. Books and other forms of media such as presentations and video are vital to demonstrate the design thinking process and learn the necessary background knowledge to real life problems that need to be solved. Since attending the conference I’ve already reimagined our makerspace and ordered new books to help promote the design thinking process and bring real-life learning inside the walls of our school.
Luckily, I also got to present at TIES in their makerspace playground. I was able to share our engineering design process and project-based learning our students do at Talahi. The compliments and discussions were so positive that I know what we’re doing at our school is contributing to student success.
The first day of Picademy was spent learning about the Pi, tinkering with program starters, and getting to know the people around us. We had time to work together on projects of interest and time to work alone.
Our team project. Our goals were to write a program to trigger a camera situated by an office door, to turn on based on motion and live stream a video of who was at the door. We thought this would be helpful to see who is at the door even when we are not physically able to be there. We also thought it might prompt conversations with colleagues on how we created it thus allowing us to talk about computer science and computational thinking.
At the end of our allotted time, we were able to share our work with our peers in Picademy. We did a live demo of what we had accomplished so far, talked about our path to get where we were, and what we would like to do if we had more time.
Picademy was a great experience. While it was only two days, a quick two days, I had a lot of hands-on time to tinker with the Pi and think about how I could bring it into classrooms. My biggest take away is that when the project has a real connection to the creator, it is easier to push through the frustrations. I really wanted to create a spinning shoe rack on the first day of the Picademy. My real life need caused to me to work through my frustrations instead of giving up… but that is a whole other blog post.
