ISTE highlights

Welcome back!!  The school year is fully under way now and we are all settling back into a routine.  The air is turning crisp and we are redecorating with pumpkins and mums.

Photo by Carrie A. - https://www.flickr.com/photos/27353377@N04/15383799350/

During the summer, Greg, Andrea and I attended the ISTE Conference in Philadelphia, PA.  For our first blog post of the year, I want to highlight a few takeaways that I hope will be useful to you.

LEGENDS OF LEARNING - This website has a free version which will be very useful to science and math teachers.  It is game-based instruction tied to standards.  For science, it uses the Next Generation Science Standards.  At ISTE, we launched cows into the air and measured their distance.

The teacher can customize a playlist of assignments/games for the students according to their need.  More information on the program and how it works can be found here.

E-HALLPASS - Well, you know all about this one, middle and high school teachers.  This system allows us to keep a digital sign out system for students.  For the purpose of keeping tabs on students, it also allows us to limit which students are in the hallway at the same time, place a limit on how many bathroom visits a student can have in a day, and send a pass to a student that needs to see a certain teacher.  In the past, every teacher had a different system and a different amount of consistency.  Now we have one system and we don't have to interrupt your class to figure out where a student might be.

STORY SPEAKER - Google has a lot of lesser-known tools and this is definitely one of them.  With your Google home, you can make a choose your own adventure story.  I do not personally own one of these, but my dad does any my children love to say, "OK GOOGLE PLAY SMOKE ON THE WATER!" and then giggle when I look annoyed.  THAT is why I don't own one.  Anyway, this tool works with a template that your students can edit, and then you can play it back.  This would be very useful for a creative writing class!

LIFE TAGS - Life magazine has used the power of AI to look back on history through its many years of publications.  You can search for a term and see all the photographs with that item in them, from coral reef to hat.  This is a great way to look back on history and could serve as a discussion prompt or resource for research projects.

There are many other subject-specific items to learn about.  I hope if I shared them with you that you have taken a look!  The internet provides us with an endless amount of ideas and resources, but sometimes it can be hard to keep up!