Webster City Inservice

I have been asked to give a presentation to some of the Webster City faculty on how to use Doctopus and Goobric. For those unfamiliar with these tools, if you use Google Apps for Education then you are missing out. Doctopus is a script that allows you to make copies of documents and establish permissions for your students. But it is much more than that. The script also gives you the ability to track progress, grade the assignments, and change permissions so students are not able to make edits once it is time to grade the assignments.  Goobric is a Chrome extension that gives you the ability to add rubrics to an assignment, grade that assignment and give students feedback.

I am very honored to have been asked to present this info, and hope that at the end of the half day, they are as excited to use these tools as I am to present them with this information.

Here are two very good tutorials on Doctopus and Goobric

I am asking the staff to take this survey for the demo of Doctopus.

My hope for this training is that the staff of Webster City come away with an appreciation of the power of Google Apps for Education and the scripts that are already available for use. I hope to conduct more of these trainings for other districts in the future.

ITEC 2013

Once again, it is time for the annual ITEC conference. ITEC will take place October 13 - 15, 2013 at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines. This is currently the only venue in the state large enough to handle the conference. Six years ago the conference was small enough to be held at the downtown Marriott. My how things have changed. This year there are over 1200 people signed up to attend. They are teachers, school administrators, AEA staff, IT staff, and technology integrationists. It looks to be another wonderful conference.

 For me, it is hard to believe that my tenure on the board has come to an end. After six wonderful years and a lot of personal and professional growth, I have reached the term limit for board members. I have made great friends along the way. Learned quite a bit about the conference and myself. And mostly I have had the opportunity to work with a great group of people with a common goal. Did we agree all the time? No. Did we get along all the time? Of course not. But we put together some great resources and opportunities for educators and we always kept that goal in mind. (Well, almost always)

 I have been on the vendor committee for 5 of the six years and have been the head of that committee for the last two. It has been a job I have loved but will not miss. Without the vendors, the conference can not exist. Vendors keep the cost of the conference reasonable. Without them, the cost would probably triple just for ITEC to break even. That would also keep ITEC from doing the extra projects that they do. There would be no student technology fairs, no Spring IT Conference, and no ITEC grants. Be sure to stop in the vendor hall and say thanks.

 This year we added the S'more sessions in the vendor hall. You can come to a 20 minute tech tip session and then visit vendors, all in the time you would spend in a normal session. Look for the camping classroom in the back of the vendor hall. I am presenting a session there on Flubaroo.



As part of my tech tip, I am asking attendees to take this survey.

 So as I say goodbye to ITEC both the conference and the board. I tear up a little and look forward to the spring when I once again can actually attend sessions at a conference.

September 16 Professional Development

I am very happy to be presenting at the Regional PD day in Webster City. This is the third year of a regional professional development and the second of this layout. Though the players have changed, South Hamilton has left and Saint Edmond has joined, the opportunities remain great.  Webster City has done the vast majority of the work getting this day set up. Elizabeth Hubbell from McRel will be keynoting the event and having had the opportunity to attend one of her seminars before I can state that she is a fantastic presenter.

Mark Murphy the Director of Technology at Webster City has done a fantastic job setting up the SCHED. For those of you who have not used this web based program, it is a great way to set up conferences and have people sign up. I truly like these type of professional development days because there are so many opportunities to learn and you are able to attend those sessions that are of interest to you. It is not just a "sit and git" day. And it is not all conducted by one person.  Of course this means that there had to be a large number of volunteers willing to present.

At the regional PD day, I am will be providing five sessions on three different topics. I am going to use the remainder of this post to be a place holder for the presentation info and forms that I want people to fill out.  If you are not attending the PD day, feel free to look over the information and even fill in a form. As they are all for demonstration purposes, the more the merrier.

Session I:  Google Docs: Above and Beyond Sharing.

This session covers some of the lesser known features of Google Docs. Beyond sharing, there are different tools provided by Google and third party creators to make the product much more powerful. We will discuss a few of them in this session.

Here is the Google Presentation followed by the survey I am asking attendees to take.



Please fill out this survey for the Pivot Table Report Demo.

Session II:  Forms & Autocrat & Flubaroo ... Oh My!

In this session  we will look at some scripts that can be added to forms and docs to make them a little more useful. Ever use mail merge in Microsoft Office? Autocrat does that for Google Docs. Ever want to create an online quiz that can correct itself? Flubaroo is the tool for you. This is the Link to the Flubaroo instructions.

Please Fill out this form to for the Flubaroo demo.



Now submit this survey for the Autocrat Demo

Session III:  Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way

 

This session will look at what some research says about the role of leadership in technology adoption and use and then look at tools to help make technology integration a reality in your district.

I am Flubaroo and You Can Too

It's TICL time again. Being an educator words like that could get me into some serious trouble. But this is a GOOD TICL. It is the annual Northwest Iowa and Prairie Lakes AEA's summer technology conference.  TICL stands for Technology Integration and Instruction for the Twenty First Century Learner. This year I am presenting two different sessions. That makes me the Iowa equivalent of the doublemint twins. Except I am not a twin and probably should never be on a television commercial. My two sessions are both on products related to Google Apps for Education.  This seems pretty fitting since I (warning ... shameless self promotion here) just qualified as a Google Apps for Education Certified Trainer.

Session number one is on Flubaroo, a script that allows you to create Google Forms and make self grading quizzes and tests out of them. Here is the link to my demonstration quiz LINK.
I have also created a Google Doc with instructions on how to use Flubaroo here.

You can also find the form embedded at the bottom of this post

The second session is how to use the GAFE control panel and some best practices.  I had planned on showing Flash Panel because when I submitted the session, it was free to education. This is no longer the case, and while I feel it is worth the cost of admission, I hate showing for pay tools to people that are not already thinking about them.  It feels to much like a sales pitch and that is not how I roll.

The rest of my summer is jam packed with such fun things as fork lifting 90% of my network switches and getting our new student information system up and going. The job of a tech director is never done.

Iowa 1:1 Conference

April 4, 2013 has come and gone and so has another Iowa 1:1 conference. This conference was originally established to foster connections between schools in Iowa that had established a 1:1 computing program. It has now grown into a statewide technology conference where 1:1 schools get the opportunity to show the rest of the state the wonderful things that they have done.  For me this conference is a chance to network.  Being a Technology Director means that there is only one of me in the district. That means that there is no one else to bounce ideas off of, or to ask questions of. This makes conferences like these very important to develop connections with other people in the state that do the same type of work.

Sessions are great. It is a wonderful chance to get a lot of information from someone who has hopefully gone through the growing pains of putting a plan into action. But that is a sit and get mentality and not always the best option for someone like me who has adult onset ADHD. I prefer standing out in the hall and talking to people to pick their brains or allow them the slim pickings of mine.

The main floor of the old "Vet's Auditorium" now the Iowa Events Center was filled with approximately 1,200 people with the common goal of increasing and / or improving the use of technology in education. To have that many like minded individuals gathered in the same place is energizing to say the least. I attempted to gleen as much info as I could in the given amount of time that I had. It was a herculean task at best to reach out to all the people that I wanted to, but I feel very good about the info I was able to gain and give. Here is a small list of topics that were addressed in the hall rather than in the sessions.

• How to get a Cisco wireless system to pass Bonjour packets
• Conversion from JMC to Infinite Campus
• "Best" bags for a ChromeBook deployment
• What vendor is best at generating SQL queries
• What Deli has the best sandwich (Palmer Deli for those interested)
• Quality Chrome Apps for Video Editing (if there even is one)
• Google Apps for administrators
• Suggestions for enterprise wireless solutions
• LMS / CMS solutions
• University of South Florida Technology Integration Matrix
• TPAC (Always a favorite topic)

 Until I get the opportunity to attend another conference like this, I will return to my virtual world of twitter to keep up with my colleagues throughout the state.

R.I.P. Google Reader

I have a Google Reader account, but to be honest I rarely check it. I barely have time to check my e-mail, check my Twitter feed, keep up with Facebook, do my job, and spend some QT with my family. That being said, Reader made great sense in aggregating info for me rather than me spending hours checking all the blogs and feeds that I wanted to look at.

Google has decided to end of life Reader. There seems to be quite a bit of buzz about it in the twitterverse, but I have yet to see anyone explain why they "need" reader.  There are other aggregators out there. Is it as convenient in this Google Apps world? probably not, but there are choices.  I will provide a few here for you.

First of all, Google + will supposedly absorb Reader and take over what reader does. This seems to make sense as Google is trying to "put more wood behind fewer arrows". (their words, wish they were mine) Will Google + aggregate? I am not sure, but I would think it will.

Here are some web based tools

Netvibes
Feedly (NOTE:  feedly uses reader on the back end, so be aware)
Newsblur

Or be very daring and leave the web based world and select an application

FeedDemon (PC)
RSS Bandit (PC)
NewsNetWire (Mac and iOS)

I am sure there are other choices out there and now that reader is condemned, more will probably be developed. One could even hope that Delicious Monster or Panic could create an application.

In the end, the death of Reader teaches us to be careful about putting all our eggs into one big Google basket.

EdCamp Iowa

This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend EdCamp Iowa in Storm Lake.  I am not sure what the total attendance was, but it was far fewer than it should have been.  If you have never been to an "unconference" then you should definitely attend one.  The premise is that the attendees choose the topics of the sessions. It is not a sit and "git" type conference but rather a full scale participation conference.  Session leaders are facilitators, not presenters, and attendees are participants rather than receivers of information.  The first session is all about setting up the schedule for the day. People volunteer to facilitate sessions based on topics they either feel learned in or that they want to pick the brains of others about.  The rest of the day is about choosing sessions, participating, sharing, and learning.  There is also a rule that if the session is not what you need, feel free to leave.

An idea that kept being mentioned was how wonderful it would be if professional development for teachers would be set up in this manner.  All too often, PD is a sit and "git" endeavor rather than a participatory activity.  My school district is currently looking at the possibility of maybe going 1:1 (is that non comital enough?). One of my caveats to a 1:1 is the need for PD that is beneficial to the staff on how to best use the technology that they will have access to.  Hosting our own "unconference" would be a great way to accomplish that. Teachers would work with each other in learning how to use technology. Those that are "experts" or more accomplished in one area could assist those who were less knowledgeable. All too often we fail to recognize the skill sets that are already available in our districts.  It used to be there was a need to bring in an expert who would dole out wisdom from on high. Of course all too often an expert was someone who traveled over 60 miles and had a PowerPoint. More recently we have begun to realize that we have staff with expertise in many areas and we need to draw upon that experience and allow them to help train our staff. The best part of this idea is that the expertise is readily available as it is most likely just down the hallway.

The idea of using this concept for PD is so encouraging to me, that I am actually going to suggest we do it at our next admin meeting. I will let you know how things go.