Ripper's Chatter

Well Saturday (April 20th) was the VirtCon with Discovery. We hosted a F2F event our Cardinal Gibbons HS, we had a small crowd. But, great collaboration and sharing of resources occurred.

We started the day with a great talk by Suzie Boss “Connecting Classroom and Community with PBL”. Her talk included ideas from other teachers and herself on how to implement project based learning projects. The key to her discussion was the collaboration with the community. Real life challenges that students have to solve. She shared  resources to help teachers get started . If you missed her discussion, check it out at PBL and communities on Livestream. She also hosts a blog and already posted the resources; Reinventing Project-Based Learning. Her books are available at Amazon:

I would recommend this presentation to anyone interested in implementing a different type of PBL and community service at the same time.

The next session we watched at our F2F(Cardinal Gibbons High School)event was presented by Kathy Beck “Globalizing Gen Z through Social Media and…”. In this presentation Kathy presented resources for web 2.0 by Bloom’s web 2.o. While sharing the on line tool, she also shared the app that would complete the same task. The only problem I see, but for most it probably is not a problem, she only shared the ipad app. Otherwise the on line tools were well received by all our attendees. Actually we couldn’t keep up with all the great resources she gave us, some of us had to go back on the presentation. Some of them included video, comic strips and flip book tools. Her website is a great resource for ipad apps.  Kathy Beck had some really great teaching tools and I definitely got some awesome ideas for my classroom. I will have to revisit this presentation at some time.

The keynote session at noon was given by Michael Furdyk about “Imagining Future Friendly Schools”. He talks about engaging students across the globe with technology. He mentions Don Tapscott and his book “ Growing up digital”. Michael Furdyk began his presentation giving the background to the rise of his ideas for TakingITGlobal. He has a passion for helping young people get involved in solving some of the challenges they face around world. The growth to his idea is amazing. Problems faced by young people vary today. His examples included different  stories that are inspiring and helpful to create a sustainable and action project. Awesome foundation for young people to get help and information on how to address the different challenges. If you are interested in getting your students involved, this is the way to go. His stories and talk are inspirational. Check out the website for TIGed to see more information.

Afternoon sessions included a couple of really good presentations. We had some people go off on their own to watch the ones they wanted to watch. There was a whole strand for the techbooks, some included how to integrate the resource, others were just about the resource and what is available.  For anyone who is interested in going to e-books this might be of interest. History Techbook with Brad Fountain and Science Techbook with Michael Bryant.

Another session addressed ipads and apps used in the classroom. One of the other sessions addressed how a district is implementing a technology into their schools. Something our school is currently looking into. I think the afternoon were full of some awesome presentations and it was very hard to choose a specific one. But, that is what makes this so great you can revisit the presentations anytime. To find all the presentations you can go to Discovery’s livestream channel at http://new.livestream.com/DEN.

Last session was given by Jennifer Wagner; “Selling the 7 "C’s" of Connections”. Main topic “connecting with other teachers”.  Her discussion included collabarting and how important it is to work with other teachers to help you enhance your classroom. She had a really good discussion on sharing with others, curating and even addressed how sometimes we don’t share enough with other teachers. Creativity was her next topic, she presented resources for this “C”, one of them was Global Read Aloud. Ms. Wagner did a good job in presenting examples for each of her ideas (“C’s”). I think the the DEN Favorite Places is a great idea. Everyone who attended was very interested in this idea.  Again I will have to revisit this presentation. Her collaborating, curating , creativity and other C’s were great issues to talk about with teachers.  This was a great PD talk.

Wow what a day tons of information to process. Didn’t even get to go to all the presentations. Recommendation; go to the Virtcon Live website and find the presentations and watch them. Great information available to all teachers.