Learning is the best when you get so many ideas, you just can't decide what to do first! As an educator, I seek out as many learning opportunities as possible, even in the summer! One of the great things about being in Indiana is the initiative by the Department of Education to sponsoring Summer of eLearning conferences across the state! I've had the opportunity to present at some and also attend many sessions! This summer I was excited to attend the South Shore eLearning conference (#sselearn) in Hammond, my old stomping grounds!
Kudos to the staffers that put together this fantastic learning opportunity for educators! As you would notice from my twitter (@RyanCEckart) activity, the conference's unwritten theme was to Empower Students. The opening keynote on Day 1 was presented by @BuddyBerry, the Superintendent of Eminence Schools in Kentucky. He shared great stories of Thinking Differently and approaching life with the mindset of Yes, and... Superintendent Berry focuses the efforts of his district on what kids can do and the passion they have for learning. He spoke repeatedly about empowering kids to find something they love, and letting them struggle, think critically and problem solve along the way to a solution. Buddy Berry wants his students to love school and never want to leave. Think about that for a second.
I love technology and embedding it with our daily curriculum. A session led by @MrsKBradford focused on Critical Thinking with Video. Powerful idea. We are deep into learning about Close Reading in all classrooms. This doesn't have to be with only text. We can watch a video repeatedly with our students, while looking through a different lens each time or with a different purpose. Mrs. Bradford used Today's Meet to model how to use a back channel to discuss thoughts from a video the entire class watched. I believe in challenging the thinking of our students and pushing them to think more critically more often. Using the Today's Meet site, we can engage students in formulating ideas, defending those ideas and questioning others. This is a great platform to use to further develop critical thinking in our students.
@WNES_Principal always provides too many ideas in his sessions! I left this session on Coding pumped up to share ideas with my teachers and staff. I believe and am invested in his statement that we need to Coach Coding, not Teach Coding. I am comfortable with kids knowing more than me! I love lego robotics, and I coached against @WNES_Principal and his teams for a few years. I was not an expert in robot programming, but my kids were. I explained the basics, got them started and then challenged their thinking. I didn't know how to solve their problems, but I did know how to ask them to think about their struggles and how they would tackle the next hurdle. I'm so excited to branch even farther out of my comfort zone and get kids more involved with coding in my school. We have to provide opportunities to students that are out of the norm of everyday teaching if we truly want to prepare them for the world they will experience after high school.
I could go on and on. This conference provided me with so many professional ideas, this is just my first synthesis of the information. I'm excited to continue the conversation as I learn more, share more, connect more and challenge my students and teachers more each day.
