Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Huge Conference in Texas Part Two


It is over 30 degrees Celsius and here we are, over ten thousand teachers at the ISTE 2013 conference in San Antonio, Texas. A few things I want to share from the conference:

BYOD, Bring Your Own Device is the theme of many workshops here and they present tools that works on all types of phones, tablets etc.
An unsolved detail still is: How distribute an URL to an audience in a really quick way during a workshop? Does anyone know the answer?


I attended a workshop with mobile activities led by Shelly Terrell. We collaborated with Google Docs, QR codes, our cameras and some other tools. The tools I remember from the workshops are the tools that I tried out. Doing really helps to remember.

I also attended a BYOD workshop about GIS and GPS combined with Google Forms for educational use. Very interesting. The students go out in a city or in nature, collect geographical data using a form on their mobile device. Back in the classroom all of the data is visualized and analyzed on a GIS map.

MOOC is mentioned all the time (remember, this blog was part of a MOOC in 2010). I met a colleague to a former MOOC classmate at the conference. She had a poster about how to work with formative assessment in e-learning.
She also told me there where digital badges involved, I was very glad to hear this.

I watched a fantastic 3D-film about protein synthesis!

As with most things nowadays, content alone is not the reason for going to a conference like this. The content you can reach (maybe even more easily) from home by surfing.
The point of going to a conference like this, according to me, is the things around the content, the coffee breaks, lunches and dinners and social media networks where you discuss the content.