Reflections from an ISTE First-Timer

ISTE ended a week ago and it has taken me this long to fully process my experience.  I walked away full of notes in Evernote, many QR codes, product fliers, and bookmarked websites.  As the perpetual qualitative researcher I naturally looked for the patterns.  The pattern that binds my experiences at ISTE is the notion of PLAY.  This was not shocking to me because intuitively I knew that I thrive on play and my students certainly do too.

Flashback to this past school year...  I had the amazing opportunity of having a 1:1 tablet classroom for the month of September thanks to being a Sony Education Ambassador.  Although teaching third grade for the second year was stressful (at least I had one year of testing under my belt), I looked forward to seeing how the curriculum could be enhanced by the use of the Xperia tablets.  Curriculum drove instruction, the tablets made things playful.  You can see my blog post on my students' work here.

At the end of the school year, my school district had me pilot the use of Chromebooks in my classroom and I was elated. Not only were the kids excited about using the new, novel technology, but so was I.  I looked forward to going to work everyday because I got to "play around" with the Chromebook.  My students were encouraged to use Chrome apps to be creative, be collaborative, be critical thinkers, and to communicate.  As a result, they thought they were playing, but they were also creating the most amazingly detailed work that involved lots of reading of print and online texts, lots of paragraph writing, and lots of providing quality feedback for each other. You can see their work while studying China and Water on my website.

Ok, back to ISTE... 

Moby Sighting

 I attended workshops centered on Minecraft, augmented reality, apps, game-making with ARIS, and other web-based games.  The icing on the cake was listening to Kevin Caroll speak about how everything he ever needed to learn in life, he learned on the playground.  The obvious take-away is that play is essential for learning and knowledge development.  We thrive when we play!  Time passes quickly when we care about and are engrossed in what we enjoy.  It just doesn't seem like work!  What if entities in charge of curriculum development considered this?  When is the last time you heard a child say, they would love to play a textbook or reading program anthology?

Thankfully there are education leaders out there that are celebrating the state of play in education.  They recognize like James Gee that games are part of the "New Literacies" that are essential in today's digital age (read more about Gee's thoughts here).

Based on what I experienced at ISTE I recommend checking out these resources.

• Phillip Vinogradv's presentation from the Google for Education booth on gamification
• Changegamer is a website that promotes the use of computer games to learn about, "energy, climate change, natural disasters, the environment, economics, politics, history and science."
• AWW Web Whiteboard is a collaborative whiteboard.  Share the board and anyone can join in
• Padlet is another interactive space- shared by Steve Dembo and Adam Bellows
• Build interactive lessons with Pear Deck (works with GAFE accounts)- shared by Steve Dembo and Adam Bellows
• Make infographics with Picktochart- shared by Steve Dembo and Adam Bellows
• Marianne Malmstrom shared her resources for using Minecraft in the schools
• Tuvalabs has data sets that students can interact with to "empower your students to think critically about data, ask meaningful questions, and communicate conclusions.
• Teachersfirst is a collections of lessons, resources and units
• Denise Jaffe's site for Universal Design for Learning 
• Microsoft's Innovative Teaching and Learning site
• Teaching with Primary Sources at Governors State University has a great site and the team that presented shared their Blendspace page that contains information on how they use ARIS for game making to learn content

Of course there is so much more that I learned and experienced... Stay tuned.