A Smorgasbord of Ideas for the Classroom from EduTECH 2014

As well as the keynotes, there are sessions at conferences where you just need to balance them by finding some solutions that just might work in the classroom to make some of the big picture stuff glue together.

Think of them as the "but what will I do Monday period 1?" answers.

So this post just takes some ideas from a few of the sessions I attended and mentions them as places to go, apps to try or ideas worth exploring.

1. Microsoft OneNote Setup Tool for Teachers - now that OneNote has versions for PC, Mac, Surface, iPad, Android then this app has to be considered for some of the content creation, sharing, collaboration and feedback options. Now, I have to admit that if all Microsoft's products, OneNote is the one that I really think is pretty cool. It's more functional on a PC than a Mac or an iPad, but it still has some cool features on most platforms.

I stumbled upon a session that showed how this add on for OneNote in the Office 365  'store' allows you to construct complete workbooks for yourself, your course and your students and then deploy them automatically through OneDrive. The tool let's you customise the workbooks for students and then by default you can see all of theirs in your version, but they only see their own and any content that you have pushed out. It's new and it looks really cool. Can't wait I see if it works as they showed. 

2. Much talk around the power of programming or coding and it's place, or at least, it's lack of place in current school curricula. It is suggested that every student should know how to code to some degree. Those proposing this state that it is part of the natural flow to digital literacy, that students should know how to control the device and the network for their own creativity, rather than solely rely on using someone else's apps. So there were great examples in Gary Stager's session that showed the awesome art that comes from applying simple mathematic concepts using programming languages such as Scratch and presumably whatever the current version of StarLogo is. The stuff Gary showed was certainly cool. He was big on Turtle Art 

3. The Maker Faire concept. Again, promoted by Gary Stager, but his push on this came from his own passion that kids learn by making stuff. Of course, Gary was a student of the great Seymour Papert and Seymour of course was a firm believer that mathematics education in particular is need of a major overhaul. Gary talked about the recent Maker Faire in San Francisco which was attended by 150,000 people. 

He showed 'awesome Sylvia' and wow - be prepared to be blown away by this now 12 year old girl who was only 8 when she started her website. There are all sorts of ideas here.

You get a sense of how wonderful kids are when you see this from them ... this video from super awesome Sylvia was posted in 2010 ... as Stager says "this is what 8 looks like".

Now, just in passing, I wonder to myself at the use of language, technology, art, mathematics, science that is being shown here... lots of rhetorical questions spring to mind!

4. 3D printing. Build something useful. For the first time we can actually do this. Get kids to explore this. As Gary pointed out, often these 3D printers are tucked away from the 'main stream' classes where they are only seen by the 'dumb' kids in tech classes. (Ian McCrae from Orion Health says exactly the same thing!)
Gary referred to his book "Invent to Learn" and he also has a couple of new books due soon on 3D printing and featuring Super Awesome Sylvia!

5. Augmented Reality. Not too much going on here, but did attend a session by someone using Aurasma with school wide events. Worth exploring more as both teaching resource and letting students have voice. Can be used easily with QR codes if you are in to those or with any kind of trigger.  The guy I saw had used in conjunction with a 3D manipulation tool called Augment. Again, worth exploring. I've used Aurasma before and it's time I revisited it.

6. Chris Betcher is someone I first met at a show in Auckland several years ago. He's an enthusiast and always has good ideas. He ran through a potpourri of simple ideas, often iPad apps to do with image manipulation and photography. But he tried things and he has several ideas worth following. I particularly liked his repurposing of a politician's speech using Audacity and GarageBand. Chris is currently half way through an ambitious project of creating something new every day for a year. Check out his site at mydailycreate.com. His concept with this is that he might just uncover a few things that can be deployed in his classrooms as creative stuff for kids. I'll leave it to his blog to tell you about the apps and ideas that he has already done so far this year.

And as Chris says - "create is a daily activity'.

That's about it as a roundup from the "practical, doing" stuff.