Jeff+Puhala

__Jeff Puhala__
These notes were taken in the actual sessions and therefore are in rough/unedited form. The conference was great!

Jeff Puhala Conference Report PETE&C – 2011 I attended many useful sessions during the PETE&C event. I took the following notes at the event (rough draft form): Standards-Based Blogging Portfolios – Michelle Krill, a former second and third grade teacher, now an instructional technology specialist, presented a session on using blogging as a learning tool. Project started as a book study of //Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World// by Heidi Hayes Jacob. Primary level students create blogs and make the teacher an administrator on their account. Wordpress and EDUblog was mentioned as resources for blog use. Students set up their dashboard, made the teacher an adminstrator, setup their account with a theme, and were shown how to write a blog. This district uses Wordpress as an in-house installed piece of software. Students answered questions from the instructional technology specialist in an online blog which was in collaboration with instruction that was happening in the general classroom. Students also created a story map in their blog. The presenter felt that blogging encourages creativity. I liked the idea because it focuses on writing and in specific sometimes free writing. Free writing always generates ideas for formal writing. Kidblog.com and Google Apps are an alternative to Wordpress. iPads in Education: Personalizing, Learning, and Creating – Marco Torres, a teacher from L.A., taught a session on using the iPad. Marco discussed his role in making sure learning happens. He presented apps for the iPhone and iPad. Songmaker was one app that looked AWESOME for the music classroom. It automatically tunes the singer’s voice. There is a nice app called iFox which is a mind mapping focused app. iThought and Mindnote are also other good mind mapping apps. Livescribe was described as an app where the electronic pen transcribes your notes and literally knows what you were thinking at that given time. Pencast is a free app to bring the notes into the machine. The Daily is one of the most downloaded apps for the iPad. It gives all the news that is current in the electronic format. It seems that it would work well in an elementary environment for current events. I would probably recommend it to upper elementary students. The app Flipboard connects with Twitter and uses the social media in a newspaper type of approach. The app Discover works off of Wikipedia and makes it really graphically attractive. Pulse is another app that rethinks how news should be delivered. Puppet Pals is an app for iPad that lets you create your own shows with electronic puppets…..totally impressive for elementary folks! Saving info can be saved to Dropbox, iDisk, and iFiles. Pencil cap turns pictures into sketches. Airharp was a neat program for playing automatic music. The iPad also has a very useful piano is part of my hidden agenda in the iPad cart grant that I am currently authoring. Thumbjam is a music app….too complicated to write about here. iRig works as an effects padeal….replaces all the expensive old pedals. Ampitude turns your classroom into a recording studio. Torres21@mac.com and the session number for con-ed is BL023573. Alaslearns.com for the website…… Power of Creative Projects? Learning That Lasts! - powerofprojects.wikispaces.com – this teacher uses a variety of technologies in her classroom – she demonstrated the uses in our session. The was a very nice variety of tools that she presented from digital camers to livescribe pens to the use of the Wikispace. She recommended donorschoose.com to get equipment donated to the school. She recommended having the technology available for use at all times. The tools ranged from creating pictures to making podcasts. The workshop ideas were more geared for middle and high school kids as it created an avenue where students work independently while the teacher updates the wiki or uploads the digital photos, etc. This wouldn’t work well in the primary level where students need constant supervision, but her ideas for middle and high school kids were good. TELL – professional development model from the AIU3 – relevance to my role as coaching and to my job in music was questionable…..workshop didn’t really apply to my duties. Honestly, this session was not a smart pick. iPad Deployment in Schools – presented by Sara Heintzelman – iPad are a great tool to differentiate instruction – it also saves reams and reams of paper – is portable and a green device – Presenter gave a timeline on how to actually plan out the implementation of an iPad project from designing the project, to a board presention, to ordering them from apple, etc. The presenter stated that if the faculty is not trained the iPad project/device use will not work. She gave a very nice timeline, week by week, how to launch the iPad project. The key to their success is the teachers feeling comfortable using them. She said an ideal timeframe is that the teachers need 5-6 months of use before student implementation. She also stated that it is probably not going to happen as the iPads will need to get used by the students. She also discussed storage, charging, syncing, and security of the iPads. The Bretford iPad storage cart is a great new model that is offered by Apple at apple.bretford.com. Since the screen is glass, cleaning the iPads is a big task. A system needs developed for cleaning the iPad screen. Teachers using iPads need to be super organized in storing the iPads after use (such as no one leaves the classroom until all the iPads are stored). She said the devices neeed to be cleaned regularly and a system needs to be developed for cleaning the devices. The presenter recommended iear.org and momswithapps.com for app review in addition to the Apple store. Excellent session! There’s An App For That! – apps to increase community engagement and other web 2.0 tools. Evernote was a nice app for saving portions of content whether print or electronic. Google toolbar and Jing were discussed. Schoolwires hosts the Holidaysburg SD wesbite. They hav e a new version called Centricity 2 that has a pile of useful apps that man be used for many reasons. The presenter talked about the importance of blogging and to get administrators involved with the blog so they understand how it can positively interact with the class. Sharing a long URL can be shortened by using tinyurl.com. bitly.com is also another way to share a long link in a short version. She also shared [|www.rememberthemilk.com] so you can send yourself a reminder for anything. Online backup can be done at []. You can help youself obtain positive habits at [|www.habitfoorge.com] to create a habit. Voice Conferencing can be used at []. Personalized Voice Mail can be used at [] (really great site!). Text4free can be used for free text messages….also TextNow which is what I use. Why pay for it when it is free? Useful teacher apps are testmoz.com and quizinator.com (maybe beginner workshops for March?). Glogster EDU – Oh The USES You Will See! – ktitraci.wikispace.com b-7bobcats.wikispace.com – Act 48 GL033424 - This is a great tool for elementary to make online presentations. This was a really impressive workshop. There was so much information that I cannot even begin to report it here. This is yet another topic for after-school workshops that could easily fill an hour or more slot. I think I will try this myself and see how the students like it before I try and migrate it out to the teachers. It looks fantastic, though. Great workshop! She also integrates Glogster into Google Earth to create virtual field trips. This was really interested and I am positive elementary kids would be really interested in something like this. Primary grades would be ecstatic about it. Presentation mode is only available though in the premium (paid) version. How Smart Are Your SMARTboard Lessons? – Colleen Aubel – Presenter gave tools that can be used on the SMARTboard – SMARTExchange was mentioned (and which we teach in our after-school workshops) – use of screen shade – visit exchange.smarttech.com often (it’s your friend) – use YouTube to search for “SMART two minute tutorials” – she mentioned the transparent backgroud tool – she also presented many more useful tools in the Notebook 10 software. Who Wants to Be A Millionaire for SMARTboard looked really cool! It was evident from the presentation that the PC end of SMART is more advanced than the MAC end and also includes more useful tools. iOS Apps for Education – as of Friday, 2/11, the App Store had 24,000 Education Apps – Productivity Apps – Penultimate, Wunderlist, Find iPhone, Bump – **Penultimate** allows you to take notes with your finger. There is also a special stylus that can be used on the iPad glass screen – Stylus is called a Griffin – does not convert your handwriting to type – **Bump** lets you move an app (it’s name only) from one iOS device to another iOS device – you can install it then from the App Store – **Wunderlist** is a task manager (iOS and desktop app) – Find iPhone (self explanatory) – Math Apps – Wolfram Alpha – Math Board – Number Line – Math Ref – **Language Arts** – Kobo – free eBook reader with 1.8 million free books – Google Docs – Wikipedia Mag – iBooks – **Science** – Elements, 3D brain, Chemical Touch, Nasa --- **Special Needs** – Dragon – Notability – Talking Tom Cat (a must – hilarious!) – **Early Learning** – Itsy Bitsy Spider – Conductor 2 – Puppet Pals (ridiculous funny and creative – perfect for elementary school!) – My Very First App – **Social Studies** – Show of Hands – Constitution – History: Maps of the World – Flipboard- **Arts and Music** – Color Splash – Magic Fiddle – Photogene – Phoster – Magic Piano – App Advice App – iear.org – [|www.appolicioius.com] - Taxonomy of Touch – Luis Perzez – mobilelearning4specialneeds.wikispaces.com – [|www.apptivities] - [] - slides link is [] Apple Accessibility – a neat workshop presented by Apple on assisted devices that are built into Mac OS and iOS devices. – The “services” menu under the name of the program is really neat. It can summarize information from the web. Alex is a built-in voice that can read text to you. The ability to create ePub’s on Pages and migrate them to the iPad gives me a very good new idea on how to use them for literacy in the music classroom. Decent workshop, but we need the iOS hardware to make it work. JL083558 Can You Really Teach Music Using 21st-Century Technologies? – John Gabrielle from Derry Township SD (Hershey) showed how he incorporates VoiceThread into a jazz musician unit. Students got over their initial reactions of the pieces and then watched videos online and provided comments to the music through Voicethread. Voicethread is a subscription service, but in place a Wallwisher would also work for this project and would be more in line with MU as it’s a free resource. He uses a Wikispace and puts up a YouTube clip of the week. KL103381 – Act 48. Citation maker online is easybib.com. Noteflight, JamStudio, Audacity, Go Animate can make the story alive. On a project, one kid created the story, one kid created the music, and one kid created the animation. Google Squared makes spreadsheets. Justine Kobeski – Facebook in Education – Yay! Our own IU is presenting! - VERY informative session on using Facebook and all the settings, etc…..all great stuff!