Category Archives: Conference

Conference, Guest Blogger, Services

TIES 2018: Rachel Miller

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!



Conference

TIES 2018 Scholarship: Tom Kuhn

This is a guest post written by Tom Kuhn, Instructional Technology and Library Media Specialist at Sartell High School. Do you need a scholarship to attend a conference? Check out our Scholarships page!

TIES once again proved fruitful for me both personally and professionally. One thing I learned was a reading program called Actively Learn which helps students understand, retain, and enjoy what they read with this online literacy platform. Teachers can use ready-made content or use their own content and then “chunk” the text into more digestible segments by inserting questions where they want. Teachers can also add sidebar content with images or content and then link that information to the corresponding words in the text. For instance, if the content referred to self-driving cars and there was mention of Henry Ford, the teacher could link to an image and text of a Model T.

Fake news was another session that I found interesting. As an educator, I’m concerned about what I think is a trend by our students to use more social media and fewer credible sources for both their personal and academic work. This session helped me understand this trend with some history and some pointers of what to do.

I presented a poster session this year on some reading support tools such as ReadTheory, Rewordify, and Snap and Read. It was the first time presenting a poster session, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I had a steady stream of 1-5 various people for an hour and 20 minutes. I found the informal discussion and sharing conversations inspiring and helpful. We really did learn from each other.

On a personal note, this was my last conference as I am retiring at the end of the year. I thank CMLE for offering this scholarship so we educators can continue to model how important lifelong learning really is.

Conference, Guest Blogger

CMLE Scholarship: Picademy!

This is a guest post written by Angie Kalthoff, Technology Integrationist for the St. Cloud School District. Do you need a scholarship to attend a conference? Check out our Scholarships page!

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.

I demystified stop lights by learning how to write a program using Python to create my very own stop light!

 

 

Day two of Picademy allowed us to gather in groups with a similar goal. My group had a goal of using a sensor, camera, and live streaming a video.

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.

We learned that the sensor was very sensitive and that it was triggered to be on at all times. We then decided to create a button that people could push to turn the camera on. We were able to get our program to work to the point of getting the camera to work by touching a button but we were not able to live stream it in the amount of time we had.

Our group split into two focuses. We had people who worked on creating the structure to house the camera and a group who worked on creating the code. While I was drawn to wanting to create the structure (something that I have more have experience with), I pushed myself to work through the code (an area that I have just started tinkering in).

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.

 

CMLE, Conference

Thinking about attending a conference? Apply for a CMLE Scholarship!

Opportunities for professional development and continuing education are everywhere! Earlier this month was the Minnesota Library Association annual conference, later this week is the ITEM conference, and coming up in December is the TIES conference! Not to mention webinars and other online and in-person training opportunities!

We know it can often be difficult to come up with the time or money to attend conferences or training events. That’s why we offer scholarships! If you need financial assistance to cover the cost of registration, parking, cost of a substitute or child care expenses, we want to help you!

We’ve already awarded several scholarships for this year so join your colleagues and apply today!

You can read more about CMLE Scholarships here, or fill out an application today: CMLE-member-scholarship-application

Send us an email at admin@cmle.org with any questions!

Conference

Recap of the MLA Conference!

This wasn’t our exact view of the Mississippi from the St. Cloud Convention Center, but it looked pretty similar!

Last week in St. Cloud we attended the Minnesota Library Association Annual Conference! We were especially excited about this conference because not only was it literally just across the river from our office, but we were lucky enough to give a presentation each day!

On Thursday we talked about Community Engagement. The room was packed!

 

 

These pictures are from our session and as you can see, we had participants “engage” with each other as they worked out ideas for connecting with their assigned communities!

On Friday morning we got to chat with other library podcast fans about how we use our podcast Linking Our Libraries to share leadership training with our members.

If you’re interested in learning more about either of our presentations, contact us at admin@cmle.org and we’d be happy to send you more information.

On both Thursday and Friday we participated in meetings, met new library people from all over the state (it’s always fun to hear about different libraries and their projects), celebrated seeing lots of familiar CMLE faces, and attended sessions.

One session I attended that I thought could be particularly interesting to our members was one that discussed tech tips for small libraries. The presenter mentioned Canva and Google Hangouts and Forms, all of which we definitely use at CMLE, but she also introduced some new apps. Plickers is an app that would work well in schools. We got to actually try it out in our session, but watch this 2 min video to see how it works:

Another few tools she recommended were Grammarly, which helps your online writing and has a Chrome extension, and TEDed, which lets you customize a TED talk lesson to use in your classroom.

We had a great time at MLA and look forward to returning next year!