Takeaways from #HBTechFest 2014

What a day! It's wonderful to feel so invigorated with ideas at this point in the school year.  There's only 2 weeks left so little time to implement this year, but lots of great things to think about.

Morning sessions:

From the Keynote (Amy Burvall @amyburvall)

• The new MTV = Mobile, Transliterate, Visible
• FOMO - Fear of Missing Out
• Clive Thompson - Thinking out loud.  Read his book "Smarter than you think"
• We actually write more now... it's just in shorter form 
• Being connected leads to collaboration
• Teachers can become co-learners in their class.  Students can become teachres.  The more we can get the students to do the teaching, the more they will learn
• Forget about the trolls.  Be resilient, be persistent
• Teach students to write succinctly.  Ex: Summarize in a tweet, not a paragraph
• When are we going to move away from edtech being "special" to just being normal??
• What to consider before posting something online:
• Is it helpful?
• Is it entertaining?
• Is your Mom okay with it?
• *Be Share-Aware* 
• Being a participant is more important than the platform
• The cloud is our campfire (i.e. sitting around the campfire telling students)
• Ideas
• Encourage students to continue using their math blogs past this year to reflect and share their work and learning.  (They can change the URL from firstnamelastinitialperiod to whatever they want)
• Challenge WSQ summaries to be "tweet length" every so often
• Amy sends out Question of the Week on Twitter; students have a week to answer the question.  Puts responses together in storify

#ShowYourWork

• My chapter - Process vs. Product with @mrziebarth
• Sharing the process is scary and terrifying because it's not "perfected" and "presentable" all the time
• We must let go of our egos and share our process.
• There are people who are interested in the art of teaching.  Whether you are a "Dan Meyer" or  first year teacher, there is a place for you to share
• Great idea from session - We contributed to the discussion by tagging our tweets with #hbtechprocess.  Then. when it was time for us to discuss, the facilitator had a resource of comments and ideas of which to launch the discussion.  I think this would also work well in the classroom as a way for students who have things to say but don't want to raise their hands to get their thoughts out there and then be able to expound upon them when the teacher calls on them

Lunch = amazing and great conversation with @dabennett7 @Jstevens009 @gochemonline @weskriesel

Afternoon sessions:

Making YouTube Videos Interactive w/ Bill Selak

• Resources here
• Ideas for use (teachers)
• When I ask students to pause the video and try an example, they have to click on the answer they got which would then take them to a follow up video - either one that said "Yay you are right" or one that explains how to do it correctly.  At the end of each of those videos, it would link back to common video to continue the lesson. 

• Lots of other ways this can be used, but that is the most transferrable to what I am doing right now.  It would be awesome when students do video projects (I don't have them do them in my class anymore, but they do lots more in other classes) for them to do a "choose your own adventure" video.  They have to decide on key points in their script where different choices or decisions could be made and explore both options.

No Sweat Warmups w/ John Stevens

• Resources here
• Lots of great sites, some that I've seen and others that I haven't (like the visual patterns one that would have been SO helpful earlier this year!!
• www.estimation180.com
• www.mathmistakes.org
• www.graphingstories.com
• www.transformulas.org
• www.101qs.com
• www.visualpatterns.org

Mozilla Popcorn w/ Dan Bennett

• Didn't get to go to this one since it was the same time as me.
• Resources here

Flip it (my session) - see Prezi here.  If you attended my session and have any further questions, please let me know by commenting here or tweeting me @crystalkirch.