#PodStock17

PodStock is a small education conference in the Old Town section of Wichita, Kansas. Yes it is 100 degrees F in July, but that is okay (and good for when I power walk). It is actually kinda like a good family reunion, the place where they understand your crazy (not a typo), and you can have the conversations you can't have at home. Conversations, sharing, fleshing out ideas with people that think alike or think very differently , but are still massively interested in making education awesome. I really enjoy the conversations more than the sessions. I get some ideas from sessions but I really get more from the casual talking with people and just brainstorming. Getting to know someone while you work through ideas somehow makes the idea better.

​Andre Daughty (@andredaughty   ) was the keynote. Poverty and some of the statistics of poverty and education was one of his themes. A common phrase for him was “expectations are everything” . When his ideas were a call to doing something different the phrase was “bust a move”. He presented several ideas about today's students : 1) they are Gamers whether they have a gaming console or phones and that we need to be looking at that for classroom implications; 2) students crave customization , in games and life so they expect it in education ; 3) this generation kids reacts first and thinks second and we have to be prepared for that. A nice project he mentioned was having kids use only movie titles to reply to things like how was your first week of school.

There was a YouTube session on trying to get more out of it. Try right-clicking on a YouTube video to see what menu you get. People need to be careful when they copy a YouTube url because sometimes it is a YouTube shortened URL which can be blocked at school. At one time there were some annotating features available, but maybe not any more. Tubechop and YouTubetime allow you to work with start time and end time of videos and also YouTube has a sandbox (youtube.com/testtube). There are websites you can use to pull MP3's off of video like video grabby. Please pay attention to copyright and digital citizenship. If you type save before the word YouTube in the URL it will work on saving ; if you type gif in front of the word YouTube in the address it will also do something. view pure and safesharetv help remove comments and suggested videos when you view a video.

There are many tools to make quick videos which is a  great thing to do because we are such visual people and these kids are very much a video generation. iMotion app , YouTube video maker , splice app powtoons , canva app to do some graphics, iMovie,  wevideo ,stop-motion ,flip pad….just look for some.

Monty Graber  ( @MontyGraber ) had a nice presentation working with VR/AR/360 ideas for the classroom and he has a nice padlet with some resources on Google expeditions ,YouTube 360 , Google Street View , cardboard, instamuseum that uses your Instagram account ,cospaces, thinglink 360cities.

Rebecca Topp (@rtopp  ) gave us a reminder that if you have some robots and they charge overnight some of them talk and you might want to make sure your janitor knows this. Did anyone know that there were dry erase colored pencils and dry erase crayons. Somebody did tell me that they don't erase very well and you might have to use Clorox wipes.

I fiddled with my Ricoh Theta 360, but when I upload the video to YouTube it gets all grainy and doesn't look good.  So i have to work on that, maybe I need to upload video to theta 360. But Kim Herron (@herronfive ) uploaded a video to YouTube it look okay….things to work on

Met some new people, like the gang from Wisconsin ( @mlmchugh ‏ @kweber319 @GZimmerman09 ) and Katie ( @KatieHenryLearn ) from birdbrain.  So glad that Felix ( @FelixJacomino ) made it up from Miami,  that was awesome to hang out & talk with him (note to self - go visit Felix).

Conversations...it’s about the conversations….please come early (Tuesday) for #PodStock18 and stay late (leave Saturday or Sunday).  You could REALLY use Friday night to decompress and work through the ideas that you just got with people who understand or just really get to know some of the family you just met.

Podstock18 ideas ...have a Twitter fall on a monitor in the hallway or a monitor and every room with a twitterfall;  we need more pre-conference communication reminding people about what's going to happen and how it's going to happen as well as offering to answer questions for the newbies.

---