Okay, so I have been totally engrossed in this conference and attending different sessions and I really just need to get down to business and reflect on what I have seen. This was AWESOME! I checked out many sessions, but my two favorite were "Options for Building Your Teacher Website and Why YOU Should" presented byCyndi Danner-Kuhn, and "Little Kids, Big Possibilities" by Kelly Hines. Cyndi is an instructor at Kansas State University. Her presentation was about the different free tools that you can use to build a website. Most of them I had heard about, but Cyndi had some really good examples of classroom websites that were created with each of these tools. I think that I am going to try Weebly because it can allow your students to create their own websites. I already have a school hosted website, but there is no way for the students to create their own. I know they would be very motivated to use this tool. Kelly is a 4th grade teacher who uses a lot of Web 2.0 tools with her students. This was a good presentation of not only those tools (most of which I had already heard about or used myself), but also her ideas of how she used those tools with her students. Some of the tools that she used that I had not seen before were the comic creator tools. Again, I think that her ideas were good and will be very motivating for the students to use.
This conference was a very useful professional development tool (which I plan on sharing with my fellow teachers and a friend who provides professional development to teachers for the state). I could attend on my schedule, listen to the presentation multiple times, and even pause the presentation so that I could go get a bowl of ice cream (hey, it's hot out there!). The presentations were fairly short (most of the ones I looked at were about 20 minutes). I found it interesting that the teachers used different methods to create their videos. The topics were timely and the presenters all seemed very knowledgeable about there content. They even provided a link to their handouts and links that were presented in the presentation. I am presenting 3 sessions at the MOREnet Instructional Technology Conference this fall and my mind is now spinning about the possibilities of spreading my message for at least one of them for this K-12 Online Conference. Hmmm....
Well, I really should go...I need to get to Twitter and add some new teachers to follow (who I found in this conference). The learning continues!
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