#APS3T

Finally went to an Akron area education conference, #APS3T (Teach Tech Transform) in mid June. Eric Sheninger was the keynote and I tweeted out many of his ideas (under the conference hashtag). He is a great presenter with a great message of how education can be better. He speaks from the heart about how he became a better educator. His books are good reads. 

For the first session,  I checked out some Makey-Makey work by Katelyn Koppelberger. Her students do storytelling, presentations, voice recording and using other sound clips.  Then I saw a show in the planetarium, and went to learn about Girls who Code from Hannah Simon Goldman. I just wanted to hear more about GWC from someone working for them. It is a good program and now they have some money that people can apply for to purchase more resources

Day two started with Jamie Donally giving us lots of ideas about AR & VR in learning. I  caught the beginning of Michael Vaughn’s session about making better presentations by designing them with a focus on how our brain works.  “We know what good design looks like, but we don’t often see it.” He wants us to start with two questions : “what is my point” and “why does it matter”. Then I caught some of Laurie Greens Maker session. She was taking people through some hands on making and talking about what content they were doing with those builds. She went from low tech to mid tech to high tech, showing that maker and learning can be done with common supplies to expensive machines.

I ran into Jeff Gargas and Rae Hugart (first time irl) while they were recording a hallway podcast with Chelsea (??). They are part of the Teach Better Team putting on a conference in Cuyahoga Falls in November. 

I was presenting a session on Physical Computing with the micro:bit . It only attracted 2 energetic learners. They were both new to coding, and we got their “hands dirty” with some starter coding and wiring.  Amy Rudd is an APS teacher who had a session “Robot Bistro” that also only attracted 2 teachers. We are wondering why we both attracted so few to sessions that should appeal to educators (other than there were other good sessions at the same time). I hope to be collaborating with Amy in the future.

I think #APS3T is a good conference at a good venue (Firestone CLC) and I feel it could become more regional if promoted that way. It was mostly APS teachers and admins. This was the third year for the conference.