TCEA- Austin 2010

I was so excited to attend TCEA. Sabrina Villegas and Ana Feliciano were so helpful in getting our "stuff" together. They are two amazing women.
I drove in late on the 9th to Austin with Tim and my husband. He was our driver since we could only find rooms near the North side of town. He drove us in each day around 7:30 and came back Wednesday afternoon to attend the vendor show with us.
We went to some awesome presentations and a couple of not so awesome. I was excited to see that most of the equipment that they talked about is present in Spring Woods. I chose to go to anything that I could find that was either project based, web based, 2.0 or center/stations based.
We found out about something called Moodle which is super cool and I will be playing with it this summer. It is easy for kids to access, user friendly, and allows teachers to easily post cool stuff for the kids.
Here are my ah hahs or my, "I am so excited that I could jump for joy. I have found something I can use next week."
All year I have felt bound and held back by what I know. I was looking for something to help me with my grant because I am not from the computer generation. Everything that I do and learn is hard learning when it comes to the computer. Even Tim, who is about 15 years younger than I, has a totally different understanding of the workshops that we attended. Where I see the Oh that is a neat idea for the kids. He sees beyond that to the computer language of the ideas presented. He actually "gets it."
Enough whining.. here is what I discovered that will help me get my kick start next year. I discovered Weaving Web 2.0 tools into the Classroom and The Web 2.0 Toolbox by Patsy Lanclos from Tools for Teachers are two fabulous resources for teachers like me that are a little nervous about stepping foot with students into the ether net. The books have student based lessons about everything that I tried to do this year from digital citizenship, Introduction to 2.0, Social bookmarks, Google productivity tools, ZOHO productivity tools, citation builders, graphic tools, maps, content sharing, organizers, Social networks, wikis, Zamzar, Firefox, Jing, Flickr, Picnik, Animoto and conversations.
These two wonderful resources JAZZ me UP!
I attended another wonderful workshop at the very end to win i pod touches, didn't, but, got a ton of ideas from two fabulous women, my age or older, Janet Corder and Joan Gore who have co-written several books under the heading Successful Solutions for Technology Integration. I am so excited by the projects that these women shared with us that I bought that book too. I am going to try one activity pretty quickly on earthquakes. You can look for those postings on my student's science blog in the future.
My next favorite ideas came from Jim Holland and Gaby Krumm. They have put together some wonderful activities that teach kids how to use technology to create projects. Alana Morris has taught us that students remember best when they are invested in a project she connects this as the "episodic memory system." These are the events in classrooms that students remember. Well this collection of Print, Cut, and Fold Creative Technology Projects for for Math, Science and Language Arts are phenomonal. They have written up little lessons that teach the kids how to do the cool stuff like align objects, insert clip art, make projects that look cool and then connected them to some awesome lessons to go with skills that we teach every year.
Attending this conference got me so excited again about getting technology into my classroom and into the hands of the kids.
I just can't thank the district and its patrons enough for sending me to Austin and allowing me to have this fabulous opportunity to see how other teachers are doing it across the country.
Thank you .
Ohhhh I have a whole bunch of email connections and addresses and will try to get to update them soon.