NSTA Conference

This past weekend I presented at NSTA in Nashville with a colleague.  We were worried that we'd have no one at our presentation because our time was late in the day when the exhibit hall was shutting down.  However, it all worked out.  We had about 30 people at the presentation, and everyone seemed pretty interested in what we were saying!

We talked about using Socrative, the iPads, iMovie, Seesaw, Baiboard, and Notability, just to name a few.  Since our presentation was only a half hour, we decided to focus on things that work for us, and then gave an overview of other pieces of technology that we've used in our classes.

I think it turned out very well.  We met a man from Cal Tech who asked us to test out his app!  Pretty exciting!

Love the NSTA conference.  It always gives me ideas for when I return to school and it rejuvenates me for the rest of the school year!

A Bad Day

Today was not a good day.  Sometimes teaching a subject in which you are uncomfortable can catch up with you.  Today was that day for me.  I was doing a lab with my students, dealing with standing waves.  I've never been comfortable with the math of calculating the waves, but I felt I was savvy enough to do the calculation and have it match what I should get.  Boy, was I wrong!  I did the math with what my students had discovered, and I kept getting huge numbers for the speed of sound!

Thankfully, my mom (wonderful mother that she is) came and helped me perform the lab again, and I learned that the PVC pipe that I had was much too long to hear the resonance!

Now I'm wondering if I should let the lab go, or repeat it with the correct sized pipe...

Using Seesaw in the classroom

This week, I've started using Seesaw in a few of my classes.  One of our other teachers used it a bit last semester and really liked it, so I wanted to give it a try.  So far I really like it.

Seesaw is a digital portfolio of sorts.  I've been using it as a way to do formative assessments with Exit Tickets and such.  It's been great for students to take photos of their work or videos of different concepts.  It's also been great for me to document what the students are doing in class.  When I take photos, I can put them into the class feed (which is like a Snapchat story or Facebook stream), and I have instant documentation.

I wish Seesaw had a way for PDFs to be put in and for students to write on them.  I'd love to be able to have the versatility of Notability, and the organization of Handouts or Skaffl.  This would be a great way to go paperless in a classroom.

Teaching with the class set of iPads has been challenging.  I love the accessibility of the iPads, but sharing the iPads among classes has proven a challenge.

I was excited to use Notability for notes and worksheets; however, it doesn't work well when iPads are shared.