What an exciting second day (Monday) to the TCEA Elementary Technology Conference. Today, my sessions focused around the following:
- Catching Up with Old Friends and Acquaintances. I ran into Michelle Cooper, the EdTech Nerds (who published their first book)
- Coaching for Results: Strategies That Work. Discover how various coaching models can enhance classroom learning and seamlessly integrate technology into your teaching strategies! (M,8:30-9:50)
- Creating Classroom eBooks. Get your students more engaged with your content by having them become authors. Learn how to use tools like Book Creator, Canva, and Google Workspace to create digital ebooks. Join us for tips, tricks, and the how-to’s of creating eBooks with Google Workspace for Education.(M,1-1:50)
- Birds of a Feather for Special Education Educators. This was a small, but mighty group of special education (and dyslexia) educators/specialists.
Catching Up with Old Acquaintances and Friends
What fun it was to run into folks at ETC. Most of my encounters happened in the hotel check-in line, where people were strung out for a mile, but I did run into a few presenters. For example, Michelle Cooper sat in on one of my sessions:
And, Kris and Destiny from EdTech Nerds were kind enough to let me acquire a first edition of their book (get it here), and they dedicated/signed it.
Here’s a close up with them holding their book in front of the famous ETC beach ball:
Coaching for Results
For this session, I was thrilled to use the Jigsaw Method to engage the audience in the exploration of various coaching models. I kicked off the session with an activity I borrowed from Peggy and Diana, a spin on a self-reflective capacity matrix with the nine elements of instructional coaching (see it in my slide deck).
such as Jim Knight’s The Impact Cycle, Diane Sweeney’s Student-Centered Coaching, Elena Aguilar’s Transformational Coaching with Zaretta Hammond’s Culturally Responsive Teaching, and Dr. Katie Alaniz' Collegial Coaching.
I did change this session up a little from how I had done it before, including the nine elements of instructional coaching, capacity matrix for reflection purposes. What’s more, I was happy to announce a new instructional coaching certification available through TCEA (comes out later this summer).
My only disappointment? Jigsaw takes so much time, and while it consumes time nicely during a 90-minute session, it drives me crazy as I circle around listening in on group conversations.
Creating Classroom eBooks
While I didn’t snag any pictures of this session, you can check out the Padlet reflecting some of the ebook planning. Given the short time, how long people met in groups to share ideas, and my slide deck pontificating
Birds of a Feather: Special Education
This was quite the active conversation, with wonderful solutions being suggested that replaced how some were collecting data via Google Forms (the replacement was AbleSpace). However, I was thrilled to use Perplexity AI to figure out or discover a solution to a problem an educator had on how to prepare files for import.
While CSV is easy for many (I can’t count how many times I’ve done this), the Special Education specialist I was chatting with had never done it. I made sure she left with a solution, including a link to Perplexity Pages that walked her through formatting a CSV in Google Sheets, then exporting it to CSV, then importing it into SuccessEd, whatever that is.
You can see the page Perplexity generated based on my queries here.
