It takes a little while after a conference to rest, reset and review.  Rather than put things in interest order, these are jumbled, just like my thoughts.  As someone else said, it’s like sipping at fire hose.  But here are some that were worth taking notes on:

Make It Your Own: Creating a Makerspace for All by Wendy Cope @litratcher & Mark Smith @woodstockms
They started with a group of volunteers taking an envelope with tape, scissors and leftover pieces of laminate.  While they showed their school makerspace and talked about their organization and challenges, the volunteers created different projects of art, functional use, and curious displays.  If you didn’t want a makerspace area in your library, classroom or school after hearing them, I don’t understand why.  I want one!

My partner in crime (@bivlms) and I decided to divide and conquer.  I didn’t make it to Doug Johnson’s presentation: Rules of Engagement: Using Personal Technologies to Motivate Rather Than Distract but she did! This gives me great ideas on using the student’s devices to push my evil agenda of learning. http://dougjohnson.wikispaces.com.

If I coulda, I woulda followed Leslie Fisher @lesliefisher home.  I only had time to catch two of her 9? presentations.  I think some people camped out in her room. She’s amazingly fun to listen to while taking great notes on USEFUL things. Successful Photo and Video on Your Mobile Device went through really simple, fun basics of taking better pictures on your iPhone.  It’s all about the light.  As a an ex-hobbyist in photography, I know that but I never thought about it with phones.  But it’s still all about the light.  She had great ideas and I did take a picture yesterday using my husband’s phone flashlight to highlight what I was taking pictures of.  It worked great!  Top Websites & Apps was the last presentation before the closing of the conference.  In very fast (and funny) movements, she talked about things I could use.  Some I know but I have a list of things to try out. http://lesliefisher.com

I am always looking for better, newer ways to make videos.  Either a video tool for my kids to use or one for me to make instructional videos.  This I’m trying out this weekend.  Clay Gunter showed me ActivPresenter.  It has an free version with educational license that allows unlimited time, recording screencasts with voiceovers, callouts, annotations, etc. Worth a look:  http://atomisystems.com/activepresenter/

N’jemele Bush from Fulton County had an excellent session on Creating & Collaborating for PBL Classroom. She has a list of items, some of which I’ve tried, many of which I haven’t.  A short list from her longer one includes Nearpod, Class Dojo, Too Loud app,  Wordle, Penzu, Edublogs, Xtranormal, Pixtoon, Plotagon, Easel.ly, DriveSafe.ly app, Thinglink, Diigo, and many more.  It’s going to take time, but I’ll try things out one at a time.

I presented three times, with a head cold.  Sorry about that.  I will provide the PDF files of my presentations, but since I do NOT read off the slides, you only get half the story.  Sorry about that too. But not really – it’s better in person!

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