Conference Presentation

Conference Presentation - #FETC

I'm excited to be presenting at the Future of Education Tech Conference (FETC) this week. I always thought it was the Florida Education Tech Conference...which makes more sense since it is being held in Orlando, FL but apparently I found out this week that I was wrong!

My proposal was accepted for a poster session on the opening day of the conference - Wednesday. So I was able to go (it is easier to "sell" going to a conference to supervisors when you are one of the presenters...so I put in a lot of proposals during the year :). Poster sessions are really hard...you see a lot of people but you can't really explain anything in depth. Another team from our tech department was selected as well and our awesome supervisor helped us make poster for our poster session (see picture above).

Mine is a repeat of a session I presented in Greenville, SC in 2014 (SCEdTech Conference). It is called "Say Cheese! - 10 Easy Projects that Use a Digital Camera". It is a fun presentation for teachers and tech coaches looking for project ideas for the classroom that don't require a lot of high tech skills.

Once the conference is over I will post a link to my entire presentation and any cool things I learned. If you are going, stop by and say hi...my session is Wednesday 5:30 - 6:30 p.m. (I am competing against the opening of the vendor hall so that is a bit rough and I will need the bodies (ha!).

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Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock&

Bill Nye Songs with Lyrics

At the end of the Bill Nye videos he always has a fun song that goes with the episode. You can find many of the songs as stand alone videos on YouTube. This came in handy because today I am teaching a lesson on layers of the atmosphere and found a song from his Atmosphere video on YouTube titled "Fresh Aire." I really wanted to remix it and put the lyrics on the video (so the kids could sing along and see how the lyrics matched the lesson). The first thing I did was found a site that has all the Bill Nye lyrics posted used my YouTube downloader ( see instructions here ) and downloaded the song. I then imported the video into Movie Maker Live and used the caption feature to put the lyrics on the different frames (cutting and pasting from the lyrics site into Movie Maker Live). I saved the video and reposted to YouTube so other teachers could use the video with lyrics (the finished video is posted above). The process was pretty easy and I am thinking about doing it for more

Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

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