Packed and Ready to Go!

Well as I sit here on Saturday afternoon I think I am packed and have remembered everything for my big trip to Washington, DC for NECC (National Education Computing Conference). This is a great opportunity to meet colleagues (educators and other technology users) from across the country to talk and share what is going on in other school districts. I am looking forward to bringing back some new knowledge to my co-workers and the the teachers I work with here in Bullitt County.

My goal is to try to blog my experiences each day either in the afternoon/evening or during a particular session I may be attending. I'll do my very best to update as much as possible. However, if I don't get a chance to blog I will defintely be "tweeting" my experience on Twitter. You can follow me there: @ssjenk6. My Twitter updates are also synced to my Facebook at www.facebook.com/ssjenk6!

Everyone enjoy the weekend!

Susan

KYSTE Wrap-Up

Okay, I got a little lazy last night. Seeing as how I didn't get home until almost 11 p.m. after a night at the Louisville Bats game with the KYSTE group, I hope I will be excused from updating my postings for KYSTE Day 2!

Another wonderful KYSTE conference is in the books. As I have said over and over: What a pleasure it was to be able to host it here in Bullitt County. A lot of work but a pleasure to host! It was eye opening seeing the behind the scenes action and duties that go into planning a conference such as this and Kudos goes out to the KYSTE Board for their hard work. It was a pleasure meeting and working with all of these great Technology Educators.

I attended several great sessions. One, in particular, that I enjoyed was one on on collaborative tools, especially Twitter. Many of you know, and some have their great fun with it, that I have become quite addicted to Twitter. What a wonderful way to share resources in a professional learning network format. @ujdmc, @techyomy, and @sburton along with @jdscio via Skype presented this session and what a wonderful job they did. Each of them spoke about how they have incorporated Twitter into their day to day job duties as CIO's and tech administrators, etc. These guys also showed the organizational benefits of Google Reader which I didn't know a great deal about. Many other collaborative tools were presented also.

I also had the opportunity to sit in a newly formed user group meeting with some people from Meade County and Madison County to talk about and share ideas about the V-Brick Ethernet TV system that we have recently installed and plan to get more fully off the ground with teachers this August. More about this in another post.

There is so much I could write about here and will probably end up taking each topic one by one and doing a separate post about it throughout the next several days. Much easier that way. So, readers, keep an eye out for future posts on some new resources I have from KYSTE including the collaborative tools, V-Brick Information, and some Microsoft Teacher Resources.

I am looking forward to another week off upcoming and then Sunday the 28th I am off to our Nation's Capital to NECC!

More to come soon!
Susan

KYSTE Day 1

The Kentucky Society for Technology in Education Conference (KYSTE) is in full swing! We are so fortunate to have the opportunity to host this gathering here in Bullitt County this year. Monday and Tuesday consisted of a lot of room set up and preparing and it all came together today at 11:00 when everyone started rolling in, visiting the vendor floor, and having lunch. The first activity of the day consisted of lunch and a Keynote Address by a representative from the Kentucky Secreatary of State's Office. He reminded us of what is out there that our students face online each and everyday. Teaching them to be responsible citizens online is just as important as teaching them to be responsible citizens in all aspects of life. Trey Grayson's office is willing to come into schools in Kentucky and conduct assemblies for students on the Prevention of Cyberbullying.

After the lunch and the keynote, the sessions began. My co-worker and I presented our presentation on the use of the eInstruction clickers in various formats. I talked about this in a post a few days ago. The session went wonderfully with good participation and discussion of the uses of these in various aspects in different schools and districts. Our Kentucky eInstruction reps, Keith Frank and Matt Wheeler supported our session so for the last session of the day we went to support their presentation. Click Here for a PDF version of our presentation. We used this PPT to guide us through the various sites as we demonstrated the various uses of the clickers.

In the last session for today Matt and Keith stepped out of salesman mode and just conducted a wonderful discussion with group about the basic aspects of equipping a room to connect students and teachers to the outside world to enhance instruction and learning. Great job to these guys.

We ended the day with a luau in spite of the storm. The food had to be moved outside but the skies finally cleared and we were able to go outside and enjoy some music and karaoke.

Looking forward to Day 2 tomorrow!

Have a great evening!

Susan

Wordle

Yesterday I talked about our upcoming state KYSTE conference (www.kyste.org/conference) and shared the description of the session that my co-worker and I are presenting on the use of the eInstruction clickers for day to day instruction.

Today I am playing around with a cool site called Wordle (www.wordle.net). Wordle allows you to take a passage of text and arrange the words randomly with the keywords being highlighted. A wordle is a nice introduction to a lesson or an ending to a lesson in order to summarize key points. Very visually engaging for students.

Here is the Wordle I created for my KYSTE presentation: (Click on the small image to see larger version.)



Give Wordle a try for something that you might be planning whether it be a lesson for your students or a presentation for your peers.

Have a wonderful weekend!
Susan

Week off Ending; KYSTE Coming

Well my first week of summer break is about to come to an end. It has been a good one and I've gotten caught up on cleaning and some other chores. We are working next week, but it won't be too much work really. We get to host our state tech conference here in Bullitt County. The KYSTE (Kentucky Society for Technology in Education) Conference is coming to North Bullitt High School next Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday the 17th, 18th, and 19th.

More information about the conference including session offerings, accomodations, etc. can be found by visiting the KYSTE website at www.kyste.org/conference.

I am looking forward to the presentation my colleague and I are doing entitled "Why Raise Your Hand When you Can Click a Button." Here is the description that I included in my presentation proposal:

This session will cover the versatile uses of student response systems. Using the eInstruction CPS "clickers", the presenters will show how to go beyond manually typing questions into the CPS software by using questions from various places to check student understanding of concepts. CPS clickers can be used within Study Island, ThinkLink (Discovery Education), History Alive, any other document or website that has questions already created, or even a question right off the tip of your tongue. These are wonderful opportunities to engage your students with bell ringer activities and common assessments and gets you out of grading papers all evening. Other uses of the CPS software will also be shown including attaching KET Encyclomedia/United Streaming clips within a question as well as the use of Examview.

I'm sure it will be a wonderful conference as always! If you are an educator join us if you can! Then after KYSTE comes the trip to DC for NECC..Can't wait for that!

Susan

M.I.A.

I've been a little MIA (Missing In Action) on this blog lately! I see that my last post was at the end of March. Since then we had Spring Break and then the whirlwind started with testing and the end of the school year. I kept in touch through Twitter, so if you follow me there or on Facebook you know that it's been a busy ending to the school year.

Taking care of seven schools with Technology Integration is no small task. I do love my job and wouldn't have it any other way. The highlight of the month of May was helping several teachers with slide shows to present to their class, end of year programs, etc. I am proud of all of those who I helped and some who did much on their own. The pride I see in a teacher's face when they learn a new way to use technology is golden! Many teachers "graduated" from the old inserting pictures in PowerPoint and fighting to make the music work to the easier MS Photostory program. Some even tried using Windows Movie Maker. Not only did some teachers try to attempt making Photostories themselves, some even collaborated with my co-worker and I came up with projects for the students to work on. What a perfet project for students to help keep them focused after testing is over.

I am now enjoying my first day off for the summer. I am off this week and then will work next week for our state Tech Conference (KYSTE).

I hope to blog a little more often now that summer is here. I definitely plan to blog when I take my trip to Washington, DC at the end of this month for NECC (National Education Computing Conference)!

Happy Summer Break!
Susan