iWizard, GrandTrunk, and Thinking Smarter not Harder

First off, major props to Jeff Stanzler and Rory Hughes for setting this up in the first place. I truly appreciate instructors who truly try to think outside of the box when trying to educate their students. Conferences are a great way to do this, especially if students haven't necessarily gone before. While I have gone to quite a few and organized a a couple, it was interesting seeing people who hadn't before, navigate the MACUL conference, a different learning experience that I believe will serve them for years to come, I know it did for me.

Moving on to a few of the different session I attended, the first was titled iWizard 1:1 Student Initiatives. What I really appreciated about this session was that when I first walked in, I actually saw high school students presenting. This was great because I really wasn't expecting that at all being at this renown conference. It was a pleasant surprise and helped, I believe in presenting the product that they did. The students were essentially talking about an after school program that they had centered around technology and helping students become literate in the field. This ranged from teaching the students basics, having to do  with how to use a computer in school, with wifi, etc. all the way to possible aspect of coding. Students were mentored by older high school students who were mentored by just a few of the different teachers and staff at their school. The reason why this presentation was so appealing to me because save for a few of the adults who helped with logistics, this organization was ran predominately by high school students. I just found it extremely amazing that they were doing this work. Rory mentioned to me after when I saw him throughout the day, that most school's staff don't even have these skills. This statement got me excited due to the fact that students can really do unique things when given the platform to do so, often times things that are extensions to what adults can't do. It all depends I believe on the level of investment given to students, both inside and outside of the classroom.

Another session that I attended was Working Smarter, Not Harder. Derek Wheaton lead this session and while I appreciated the dance party we had at the beginning I felt as if many of the tips that he discussed weren't necessarily revolutionary. I was amazed, however, how so many other people within the audience were very intently writing everything that he was saying. I came to realize after that session that there needs to be a lot more support in place for teachers. Don't get me wrong, I definitely took some notes on a few different applications that I plan to use in the future, it just seemed as if a lot of people had never heard of some of the concepts before. Derek did a great job as a speaker in that he was very personable and seemed to have a lot of knowledge in his subject field of creating better functioning schools around staff professional development. One thing I really appreciated was that he greeted everyone at the door as we came into his session and even mentioned us UM interns within his presentation.

A great aspect that I enjoyed of this conference was being able to walk around with the many different MAC'ers in Detroit and eat at GrandTrunk and reflect on the day. This is somewhat hard to do being in placement full time now. I feel as if I never have enough time to pick everyone's brain about things. The only recommendations I have for next year would be for people to know about parking ahead of time (since a lot of ppl freaked out) and to have a formalized meal that the entire cohort does together to actually talk about the conference and just to chit chat.

Thanks again for the experience

Typing to the Rescue

The idea for my lesson plan actually came from the previous semester and the final assignment that students had to turn in. Students were to submit a final paper that unfortunately took them about 2 weeks of class time to actually complete. The reason that I believe it took this long was because students were asked to type their final paper and unfortunately most students really weren't proficient with typing on a keyboard. Furthermore, students have a lot of issues losing copies of their papers and not remembering their passwords to their email addresses. As a result of this I decided that we really needed to go over some of these basic skills as they would become extremely crucial to students within the future. This is where the idea for the assignment was generated.

While setting up proper email addresses and teaching students how to save documents were very simple, typing wasn't going to be something that students learned over night as a bit more time would need to be dedicated in order for students to get better at the activity. Of course the idea of this was not at all appealing to students, but once I told them how much typing you would have to do in college or how much any job relies on computers, students started to realize the importance of the lesson. I also realized that this couldn't be condense into one lesson plan and that this would need a few days while making sure to revisit this concept later on in the semester. As a result, students were given three days last week to work on their typing skills with the main focus being word count and accuracy.

While there is a simple chrome extension that you can use titled Typing Club, luckily Tri-County offers a semester of a writing class virtually. With the help of my mentor teacher we were able to trim this semester course down into three days while still being able to focus on the main components of typing. At the end of the three day students were given a test to see if they had improved at all from the three days of typing skills. 

Again, while three days is nowhere near enough for students to make significant improvements to their typing perhaps it will inspire in them the idea to become more proficient in typing. Furthermore, we will return this platform a few times throughout so hopefully with the combination of this tool as well as some of the assignments students will do online in the future these aspects will lead to students improving their typing skills. I think students overall did very well simply of the fact that we were able to track their results online and we were seeing signs of progress.