1 ISTE: Catalyst for Action

CATALYST:  A person or event that quickly causes change or action.  

A spark, an incitement, an impetus.

Another year has passed and I'm invigorated and ready to reflect on another great ISTE experience.  This year, my biggest #ISTEtakeaway is- "Be a catalyst!"  Taken from the motivating keynote speech by Kevin Carroll, I think it best sums up what I was hearing, researching, and learning during my five days at the conference.  You can get a sense of everything I was learning and doing through my two storify posts: ISTE Favorites Collection and ISTE @jessievaz12 Collection.

I can sum up everything I was learning into three distinct statements-

1.  Be a catalyst of action by changing student learning through making and creativity.
I've been a long time advocate of #making and #makered and have been working toward making a #makerspace in our school for quite some time.  (You can read about our progress here.)  It was so validating to see that we're on the correct path.  After listening to Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez talk about their theories from their fantastic Invent to Learn book, speaking to many great educators during HackEducation14 such as @teambond and @amboe_k who are also on a making journey, and hearing the great work that is happening in afterschool makerspaces such as the Digital Harbor Foundation, it impressed me how important it is for us to share this message passionately.  Students today need to be involved with their learning through creativity and making as a way to build personal resilience in the face of challenge, independence in learning, and working cooperatively to solve problems and challenges.  Every educator I met that is on this same journey shared the same feedback, "There are never problems with engagement or behaviour when students are making.  They are learning and having fun at the same time."  Isn't that what education is all about?  I challenge you to be a catalyst at your school by going to the Maker Education Initiative site and seeing how you can help bring the movement forward or going to Instructables and make something today as a way to tap into that forgotten love of making that everyone has dormant inside them.

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1 How to Get Ready for an ISTE Conference!

As part of my first assignment for my Connected Learning experience in the #CLMOOC sponsored by the Educator Innovator and the National Writing Project, we were asked to make a "How To" manual as a way to explain a little about ourselves as well as dive into the creative making atmosphere.

I would like to pause here for a moment and reflect on my learning over the past week.  First of all, this took me WAY WAY WAY longer than I thought it would.  WikiHow was not an easy beast to tame and I'm stupified by it as I find myself to be quite techie.  Between converting photos, uploading or searching for videos, and being re-edited as I created it, I was constantly fighting against the platform! I did much better with the HackPad site as it was much more simplified and straightforward. What I took away from the whole experience was that I am lucky that I have built up so much resilience (I blogged about this last week in my post here) because I really needed to keep pushing forward while I encountered frustration after frustration.  It made me ponder, if I had that much trouble as a "techie" teacher, what would other teachers feel and experience?  (Future blog post on this topic pending as I am now digressing!)

Anyway, here is my first silly attempt with a real intent behind it. (I'm desperate for some Google Glass so I want my husband to see how cool I am wearing a pair.  This will magically inspire him to let me buy some, right?! RIGHT?!!)  I want to give a shout out to my friend Chris Craft for letting me and my teaching team experience his Google Glass while he was here for our recent #gafesummit in Chile!

=> How to Look Cool Wearing Google Glass

Okay. Now on to something more serious... For my real "How To" I decided to tackle a recurring theme in my work so that I can share it with others right away.  Every year, I take one or two teachers from my school to the ISTE conference as a way to generate teacher level, grass-roots interest in embedding more technology into the various subject areas of the school.  Each year I have a meeting with teachers who went with me previously to help explain what ISTE is, how to plan your ISTE experience, etc.  While I'm certainly not going to pass up the great discussion that happens at the face to face meetings, it is good when you can have a resource to back up what they learned from the meeting.  Enter my "How to Get Ready for an ISTE Conference" product!  I hope you enjoy it and maybe, just maybe, someone might find it useful as well!  Feel free to add to it and hopefully visit it next year when I update it!

=> How to Get Ready for an ISTE Conference

Are you planning on going to ISTE this year?  Will this "How To" help you?  What could I add to make it more useful for my teachers that will accompany me next year?

Looking forward to your thoughts!
Jessica :)

3 2nd Place Sucks, But...

So, I'll be the first to admit it.  I've had a pretty sucky year this past school year.  That's part of the reason my blog was quiet for so long.  While I am not writing this for a dose of Internet pity, I am writing it to offer a reason why I've been in such deep contemplation and what the result of that thinking is so far.

It started around this time last year after I was inspired by ISTE13 and all that I had learned.  I realised that I needed to get out there, be involved, and do some more learning, so I set a goal to apply to a doctoral program.  But, I didn't just reach for the stars, I jettisoned myself out into educational outerspace to boldly go where I've never gone before!  I decided to apply to only free doctoral programs which paid for me to study there with a student stipend.  (In case you didn't know, there's about 7 in all of the United States and they are some of the most HIGHLY COMPETITIVE schools in the nation.  What was I thinking?!)

I worked tirelessly to get amazing scores on my GRE (I kicked butt on the Verbal and sank like a stone in Math. Ugh!).  When the scores didn't go in my favor I worked harder on my Personal Statement and response to application questions in order to wow the reviewers right past my mediocre math scores.  Sadly, it didn't work and I was denied at all the schools where I applied.  While sad, I was proud for putting myself out there and reaching higher than I thought I could.  I was a role-model for my kids and that certainly counted.  What made me sad, as I wallowed in my "second place" finish, was that I didn't know WHY I didn't get in.  A little feedback would have gone a long way.  However, I was not deterred and pushed forward to find another goal to achieve.

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4 ISTE13: Catalyst for Change!

In my last blog post, What makes ISTE different, I mentioned that I was going to have a meeting with past ISTE attendees at our school and have them give "feedback to feedforward" to the two #newbies I am bringing with me this year.  I expected the conversation to be engaging and interesting but it was so much more!  It was such an inspiring moment to hear these three teachers explain how going to ISTE has actually CHANGED the type of teacher that they are!  What a powerful statement for a conference!

All three mentioned that going to the ISTE conference helped them realise the following 3 essential points:

• They are not alone- they all arrived at ISTE with different levels of technical knowledge but talking and sharing at the conference helped them realise that EVERYONE starts as a beginner but EVERYONE can move forward in embedding technology thoughtfully
• There is a worldwide shared vision for educational technology- All three mentioned that ISTE helped them realise that the rest of the world is engaging in and using technology to develop student skills and concepts in a depth that they hadn't realised.  Seeing those examples helped them realise what is possible for our school.
• That personal learning is necessary- Two of the three teachers hadn't used twitter before the confrence but through the discussions and examples provided (and a little from me pointing out some of my favorite #edtech "rock stars"!) they realised how powerful a PLN can be.  After the conference all three teachers have become active members of the #edtech and #edchat communities on twitter.  They all mentioned that ISTE inspired them to continue reading and engaging in learning as part of their personal professional development.  

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5 What makes ISTE different?

I'm excited! It's my third trip to the ISTE conference and I'm just as excited this year as I was the first time.  Why?  It got me thinking... what makes a good educational conference and what makes ISTE different?

After a quick search on the Internet, I found this article from 2005, The Ten Best Education Conferences, from Education World outlining the opinions of a variety of educators talking about their best education conference experiences.  What stood out to me was that each conference was essentially the same format: reknown speakers, workshops, breakout sessions, posters, etc.   While each conference was aimed at different audiences and topics, the basis was that there is a group of dedicated professionals that come together to share and discuss what they are passionate about.  In fact, according to Dave Wingler from Edudemic in his blog article 6 Education Conferences to check out this year and the Getting Smart Staff from their blog article What Edu Conferences Should be on Your Agenda This Year, ISTE ranks as one of the important events of the educational conference calendar.

So what makes my upcoming trip to ISTE different than the rest of these conferences?  I've attended a few of the other conferences that were named and while they were excellent, they weren't quite the same.  There's something different about ISTE that is hard to define.  I believe it's because it is a technology event, where blogging, messaging, and tweeting are a norm for a majority of the people attending.  There seems to be this ever present community feeling at the conference; you recognize people from their blogs, their twitter handles, a connection that you had made a year before.  During each session you meet or connect with someone from your ever expanding PLN and develop plans for projects for the next school year.  The conference doesn't really end per se... it just carries on in cyber-space until the next physical meeting a year later.  I'm not sure that any of the other conferences can really make that claim to fame!

So, as in years past, I am bringing two #newbies to the ISTE conference with me and I am getting ready to have a "This is what you need to know about ISTE" meeting with them.  To prepare them, I plan on trying to explain this sense of ISTE to them so they can get a idea of how fortunate they are going to be and to take advantage of the connections they could make.  Is there anything else that I should include for them?  What makes ISTE special for you that I should share with them?

Looking forward to your thoughts!
Jessica :)

Photo Source: Crazybananas Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

0 My First Meme: ISTE13!

Inspired by an article by Anita Lee from Mashable on the history of Memes, I thought I'd try my hand at a few for my upcoming trip to ISTE13!  I love going to this educational technology conference for so many reasons, but the best reason is simply for the excitement that it generates for professional development!  There is nothing more inspiring than seeing more than 12,000 people get excited about learning!

Here are my meme attempts following a few of the different styles highlighted in the infographic above.  I thought I'd try and play up some of the funnier aspects of attending an ISTE conference.  If you've been to the conference before, you'll definitely get these!

Success Kid:

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