This is a guest post written by Amy Moe, Instructional Technology Specialist at Pine Meadow Elementary. Do you need a scholarship to attend a conference?  Apply today! 

TIES 2018 & GAME CHANGER: Book Access for All Kids by Donalyn Miller by Amy Moe

With the assistance of CMLE, I was able to attend TIES this year.  It was my goal to find sessions that would allow me to enhance the initiatives and tech tools we currently use at our school.  For example, our district tech team is reading BOLD School: Blended Learning that Works.  I attended a session called “Blending and Techifying Instruction”.  The presenter shared ways to offer a mixture of face-to-face instruction and digital tools through station rotation, the flipped classroom, and/or individualized instruction.  Each option had a similar format that gave students direct instruction, practice, application of higher order thinking skills, and extension opportunities. These are viable options for our upper elementary classrooms.  

I also attended a session on utilizing formative assessments.  Formative assessments help teachers see into students thinking and gauge their learning.  It guides instruction and offers feedback. Attending this session reaffirmed my efforts in introducing staff to the advantages of using platforms such as Seesaw, Nearpod, and the Google Suite.  Student engagement increases throughout the lessons with interactive slides at the beginning, middle and end of a lesson.

After my two days at TIES, I traveled to Custom Ed Solutions in Champlin to hear renowned author, Donalyn Miller, speak about her latest book: Game Changer: Book Access for All Kids.  Donalyn focused on three key areas: time, access, and book choice.  

TIME: Students should have at least 20 minutes of independent reading time a day.  She claims this is vital because it provides an authentic opportunity to synthesize.  

ACCESS: Students need access to current and diverse book collections through their school and classroom libraries.  This is easy to achieve during the school year, but summer months are a challenge. We need to be creative in finding funding to get books in the hands of our most at-risk, struggling readers.  

CHOICE: Students should be given ownership in finding books that interest them.  This task can be difficult so students need to be taught how to find books.  This can be accomplished through book talks, preview stacks, book trailers, and read alouds.

This is a guest post written by Amanda Holstrom, Instructional Technology Specialist and Apple Teacher at Sartell Middle School. Do you need a scholarship to attend a conference or participate in professional developme?  Apply today! 

This year at TIES, I really enjoyed hearing about the path of change that Kimberly Bryant is creating for girls in coding all over the nation. She is currently leading the charge of Black Girls CODE based in California. Her inspirational and supportive methods are encouraging girls to get involved in the tech world.  She shared her own path through technology and how that has impacted her daughter and now the nation with the creation of Black Girls CODE. These groups of girls create innovative tech solutions for real world problems and share their creations with others. Starting the conference with a message of inspiration allowed me to look for ideas that will inspire those I teach with.

I looked for sessions this year that focused on leveraging the technology we already have in our schools in a way that deepens student learning.

I learned about using Schoology to create opportunities for students to have choice and voice in their learning as well as providing a method for teachers to organize and assign tasks digitally.

I am looking forward to implementing grading rubrics, folders for organization, calendar management and using Google slides for running agendas. All of these tools will help students and teachers work together to create a learning environment that provides more learning opportunities.

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.