CA GAFE SUMMIT: Day One

It's officially "intermission" of the CA GAFE Summit 2014 and I thought I'd share a bit about my day with you. I decided the best way to summarize my experience today was to share the biggest take-away and remaining questions I had about each session. Also, in most cases I was inspired to plan for or take specific action (either in the future or immediately) and I thought that would be helpful to include. Without further ado...

Session 1: 10 Ways to Drive GAFE Adoption at Your School 
Session Overview Session Notes

• Biggest Take-Away: We need a plan
• My district has been operating on a readiness model and is moving to an equity model this year. So, we have taken a lot of little steps towards full adoption of GAFE with limited populations of teachers. It's time to look at the bigger picture and make GAFE a reality for all our educators. To do this, we need a plan that is anchored in achievable goals that promote student learning.
• Action Inspired: Let's rip the band-aid on e-mail
• Peter Henrie said that people will go where their email is and while GAFE can be successful separate from Gmail it will not ever reach quite the same level. We've been toying with this idea for a year or two and today just confirmed that we need to make a serious effort to make the switch!
• Questions Remaining:
• How can I best go about getting a meeting to discuss this with all the involved parties?
• What is a reasonable timeline for us?
• What proof/data do I need to make a convincing argument for these things?

Session 2: Toward Better Technology Integration
Session Overview Session Notes

• Biggest Take-Away: TRUDACOT
• This amazing tool will be an instrumental component of how I approach technology integration goal-setting throughout my professional development offerings this year. It is meant to be a non-judgmental design tool for teachers to help them easily identify the areas of technology integration they want to target for improvement.
• Action Inspired:
• It might be interesting to sculpt professional development sessions around one or two areas of the TRUDACOT. This could help teachers easily understand what they would gain by attending the training and what their goal is when planning instruction after the session. This could feed into the already device-agnostic PD I am creating.
• Questions Remaining:
• How will I go about getting my teachers well versed in TPACK and SAMR so that they can best understand and apply TRUDACOT?
• What will training the administrators to use this tool look like? How can it be blended with our new TPEP evaluation system?

Session 3: Google Classroom Playground
Session Overview Session Notes

• Biggest Take-Away: Under-development
• This will be a great tool for beginners but until a few additional features are added it won't quite meet the needs of our "techies."
• There are some much needed/desired features for this to truly be a universal asset to all teachers, some of which include: being able to view student work in real time, ability to attach rubric(s), control over student sharing settings...
• Action Inspired:
• Share my screencast from the session (got to interact as a student in a class) with colleagues to help them become more familiar while we wait for the official release and access.
• I need to spend some more time familiarizing myself with Doctopus & Goobric to be able to fully meet the needs of all staff.
• Questions Remaining:
• How should I approach training teachers and students to use this tool given it is releasing in August?
• What possibilities does this have for teacher professional development courses?

Session 4: Doctopus & Goobric - Wizard Driven Scripts for Newbies
Session Overview Session Notes

• Biggest Take-Away: I wish these tools could merge with Google Classroom
• All of the concerns or frustrations with Google Classroom were solved by learning about doctopus and goobric, but the process involved a few more clicks and definitely a bit more in depth understanding of Google Drive.
• Action Inspired:
• Time to practice! I need to work on my fluidity with these tools. If I am going to be able to train teachers and help them feel comfortable with these tools, then I need to be comfortable myself. :)
• With the new Smarter Balanced exams coming our way in the fall, this will be a great tool to impress relevancy for elementary classrooms as typing makes a come back within the curriculum.
• Questions Remaining:
• What skills do elementary students need to have to successfully use the combination of these tools used by their teachers?
• What are the possibilities to have students use rubrics to self-evaluate?

Tomorrow, I will be attending sessions on flipping instruction for students and teachers, the power of Youtube and many of its tools, digital portfolios for elementary students, and school/personal branding. It should be an exciting day!

Another goal I've set for myself is to be more proactive about networking and making connections. Today, I felt a bit overwhelmed with the sheer number of people (many of which are here with multiple people from their district) and worried about not making it into certain sessions. Therefore, I am not particularly proud of my efforts to network compared to my potential. However, I feel confident in my ability to conquer this "personal problem" tomorrow!