Wednesday, February 13, 2013

eTech 13 - Overview #oetc13

I had the privilege of spending two days this week attending the Ohio Educational Technology Conference in Columbus, OH. For two days, I was totally immersed in educational nerdom, both live and on Twitter, and loved it!  Over the course of the next few days, I'll debrief myself via Blogger and hopefully share some great insights with you as well.  For now, I have some quick hits before I go prep myself for classes today.

  • Innovate or become an afterthought. Like it or not, technology is changing the way education is being done. Schools, administrators, and teachers need to learn how to innovate with the times to stay on top of the technology.  The way we did school is obsolete.  How can use technology to be relevant?
  • You have to meet students where they are to reach them. I'm slowly starting to see that I can reach students better through gaming than I can through text. I'll get into this more later, but teachers have students building Mine Craft games, I am piloting a word game to teach Tier 2 Vocabulary, and I'm going to look into a game building software for my middle schoolers. No longer can I expect them to meet me in my world and my vocabulary; I at least need to appear to meet them half way.
  • Sometimes the best way to learn is to connect to others. I'm happy to say that I walked away from this conference having started conversations with other educators, and I hope that this networking will lead to learning on both sides of the email or tweets.  I even got a bit geeked out when I got to sit next to one of my favorite presenters and tweeters.  It's about connecting with each other and sharing what works and doesn't work.
  • Be very very careful what you post online. I'll get more into this later, but I saw first hand how dangerous it is to be online. In this age when nothing is private, we have to be careful to protect our privacy... and to teach our students to do the same.
  • I really like sushi.  I've never had sushi before, but one of our school's vendors sprung for a huge sushi dinner for a few of his clients.  I. could. not. stop. eating. sushi.  Wow! 

That's it for now.  I have to prep for my classes.  Maybe I'll write more later today.  

No comments:

Post a Comment