Hi and welcome back to a new episode of Tech Tuesday!
Today, I’m talking about some upcoming professional development opportunities as conference season is here!
While this is always an exciting time for me as I always love to continue learning about educational technology and seeing tweets of awesome new finds coming out of conferences, right now, it’s a little more exciting, because some of these traditionally expensive in-person conferences are offering up free virtual portions or making their virtual conferences completely free, like the CanvasCon conference for Canvas users held in October.
This week is exceptionally busy for me as our state technology conference the Virginia Society for Technology in Education, also known as VSTE, begins on Wednesday, with, you guessed it, some free opportunities! They’re actually kicking things off TONIGHT, with a free webinar with Catlin Tucker at 7 PM on Using Blended Learning Models to Design and Facilitate Learning for a Concurrent Classroom. Dr. Tucker is one of the teacher leaders I follow and I highly recommend this FREE webinar on how to create effective, engaging virtual learning. Dr. Tucker is dedicated to helping teachers blend technology and tradition to shift students to the center of learning and find balance in their teaching practice. She is a Google Certified Innovator, bestselling author, international trainer, keynote speaker, as well as an expert in the fields of blended and online learning.
I know space was limited and it might be too late to register for it. Dr. Tucker shares more on this topic on her website too.
Then all the VSTE sessions starting tomorrow, that would be Wednesday, until Friday at noon are FREE! There are great sessions on productivity in Google, Student Engagement through Choice and Project-Based Assessment: Skills for Future Readiness, Zoom in the K-12 Classroom with best practices, new features, and how to use it in a hybrid learning environment, plus Canvas Studio Quizzes: Setting the Foundation for FUTURE Mastery and many other sessions. I know in my district we just rolled out Canvas Studio so to see this as one of the free sessions is really great timing!
The paid part of the conference begins Friday at noon and I will be presenting on YouTube, Twitter, and G Suite. Or what I should maybe now be calling Google Workspace. If you missed it, Google announced a change in its G Suite name, which is on a slow rollout to educational institutions. The business side of things is seeing a more immediate change, so you may not have seen this name shift yet.
I’m hoping to record these sessions later as I won’t be able to share out the recordings from the paid part of the conference or possibly offer these as a webinar through an organization I volunteer with called UnisonEDU. We offer trainings, webinars, videos and much more. If you’re interested in learning more about UnisonEDU, visit www.unisonedu.org, stop by our virtual booth at VSTE or the panel session on Saturday during the paid part of the conference. Unison is also sort of taking over the #Waledchat, which I recently found out means Wins and Losses chat. This will be happening on Thursday at 9 PM on Twitter, where our founder Patrick Hausammann, will be the guest moderator. If you have not participated in a Twitter chat before this is a low key and stress free way to get started – everyone on this chat is so friendly!
Here’s the schedule for the free VSTE sessions starting tomorrow if you would like to check this out.
Newsela is sponsoring a 2-day community crowdsource event this Wednesday and Thursday, December 9 and 10th at 4pm EST to share practices that made a difference in 2020. The first day on Wednesday includes the Appreciation Panel, a panel of educators that will celebrate their colleagues and practices that have made a difference this year. Panelists will share resources and strategies that you can bring back to your students. The second day on Thursday is AppSmash Modeling, learning how to blend Newsela content and Pear Deck strategies. You can follow along with real-time modeling of best practices and walk away with a Pear Deck to share with your students to wrap up 2020.
Next, one of my all my time favorite and free virtual events is back! It’s Ditch Summit hosted by Ditch That Textbook! Starting on Monday, December 14 and running until January 8 (which is also my birthday!) you can get access to sessions with topics that include remote learning, tech ideas, culturally responsive teaching, creating great templates, problem-solving, and more! This year’s speakers include one of my newest favorite teachers to follow Esther Park. You may have heard me mention her once or fifty times if you follow me on Twitter.
When you register you’ll get access to the presentations from the previous four years of Ditch Summits, as well!! You will also get a certificate for every presentation you complete. If you’re in my school district and attend at least 5 hours-worth of sessions, you will get at least 5 PD points when you upload them to TeachPoint.
Finally, FETC or the Future of Education Technology Conference will be a fully FREE conference happening January 26 – 29. FETC 2021 will be a fully interactive — virtual multi-day conference experience using state-of-the-art technology — not just a series of canned webinars. You’ll hear from blockbuster keynoters, learn from top experts and innovators in education technologies, and experience an AI-based networking system to build your PLN. Again, the link to register will be in the episode notes.
If you’d like to get a preview of what you may experience at FETC, they are having a Twitter chat also TONIGHT at 5 PM EST hosted by edtech guru Tony Vincent as part of their Education Technology Learning Series. They will be talking about learning in hand and Shapegrams.
Have you heard of Shapegrams? It’s something I’ve noticed only recently being mentioned on Twitter and it looks pretty cool. They walk you through how to make different shapes and graphics using only the tools in Google Drawings. I’m definitely joining in because I know they will be talking about Google Slides and Google Drawings and how to make interactive activities for students and this is something I’m featuring in one of my sessions this week at VSTE. So maybe I can get some last-minute nuggets to add in!
Use the hashtag #FETCchat to join the conversation on Twitter. If you’re not sure how to do this, check out this previous Tech Tuesday episode on Twitter chats!
There are also a few upcoming conferences that are available for a paid registration and it’s still too early to determine if they will have a free portion, but I wanted to share them if you are interested. I will share the links to all of these events in the episode notes:
EdTechRVA, an in-person conference I go to in Richmond, VA has been announced, but I don’t have any information on registration at the moment. It will take place on March 9 and 11th. I don’t know what’s happening on the 10th, but the info I got clearly said these two non-consecutive dates. So just be aware.
CUE, Computer-Using Educators, is a nonprofit educational corporation that holds California’s premier educational technology events, but are often open to anyone to join in and this year is no different. This year will feature speakers such as Jennifer Gonzalez of Cult of Pedagogy, Matt Miller of Ditch That Textbook, and Amanda Sandoval, who is also a pretty amazing teacher I follow on Twitter, and I have previously shared out some of her virtual classroom resources.
Spring CUE will be held March 18-27. Early bird pricing is $149 and ends December 31st. After that, the price goes up to $179.Early
All of the resources mentioned in today’s episode will be available in the episode notes on Wakelet.
What other conferences are you going to or would like to go to?
Ms Priester EDU 