iPadPaloozaOU 2016 Reflections

Last week was the first iPadPaloozaOU! Thanks to my colleagues that facilitated this event, in particular Anne Beck for ensuring the conference was fun and engaging!

Highlights

Keynote speakers – Both Jessica Herring & Lisa Johnson gave excellent keynote addresses. Learning about Jessica’s curriculum to bring robots into her english class was fascinating. And Lisa’s call to think about our perspectives as teachers in the classroom was a valuable chance to reflect and grow. In particular, I enjoyed Lisa’s activity of completing an Uffe Elbaek Model and discussing our strengths with our neighbor teachers:

 

Pre-service teacher involvement – Working with students is always a treat. As Jessica stated in her reflections:

“It makes my heart so happy to know that these are the people that are coming into our schools and are preparing to make a difference in the lives of students.”

I felt the same invigoration while learning from/alongside the education students that attended iPadPaloozaOU. (Not to mention, I got to hear feedback of what students think about Canvas so far.)

 

Connecting with folks – For me this was a pivotal event to meet folks on Twitter that I have been following for a while, many of which are from the #oklaed community. Using iPadPaloozaOU as an opportunity to learn more about their various passions as teachers in Oklahoma helped me connect with these fantastic educators. For example, I know much more about the practice of #sketchnote-ing thanks to Wesley Fryer:

Twitter

For #iplzaOU, I used TAGSExplorer to capture all of the tweets containing the conference hashtag. This allowed me to track some interesting data like the most frequent tweeters:

 

And the most used hashtags:

 

If you want to look at the data yourself, check it out here (I’m assigning a CC-BY 4.0 license to this content). A good place to start analyzing this data would be using a software like Voyant Tools 2.0. For more information about all this, checkout this post and let me know if you have any questions.

My Workshop

I hosted a workshop at iPadPaloozaOU titled “Student Creators: Cultivating Success & Amplifying Voices with Mobile Blogging.” Without a doubt the highlight from this session was the discussion that took place. Specifically, there was a point at which a pre-service teacher was providing some frank feedback to a dean on what motivates them as a student to participate in class discussions versus class blogs. In summary, the student was only motivated to contribute to a class discussion to satisfy the minimum effort required for a good grade. In contrast, the student stated that posting a blog would solicit more effort from her/him as such work would be accessible to the public. I was trilled the attendees of my session were comfortable sharing their candid perspectives, especially between students and dean.

Another highlight was the curriculum development that happened during my workshop. Here’s one example from an individual looking to integrate blogging into her science class:

Turning a Blog? into a Blog!

If you are interested in the contents of my workshop, checkout the companion website I made to house my presentation and the work of the participants. Alternatively, you can read more about the workshop from the proposal I submitted.

Closing

I am already looking forward to next year’s iPadPaloozaOU and will consider submitting another proposal. Specifically, I am thinking about developing text-based games to engage students with writing and digital storytelling. Can’t wait till learn and explore this topic! Thank you to everyone for making this event a blast!

The featured image is provided CC0 by Maarten van den Heuvel via Unsplash.