Educational Excellence Institute

It was an incredible experience attending my own district's Blueprint for Educational Success National Institute in Reading, MA today. I am so proud that I work for Reading Public Schools! The jazz band greeted us as we walked into the Fine and Performing Arts Center. They were amazing. Will Richardson's keynote address and T.V. for Education workshop were inspirational and informative. I enjoyed the Podcastic workshop for the second session. Luckily, I had an opportunity to teach Photo Story for the third session with J. Laracy.

The big ideas I got from Will Richardson's keynote were that we need to be connectors, and we need to move away from the "Friday folder" routine to a more digital display of student work that is more meaningful for the student. I also learned about great sites like fanfiction.net and diigo.

We live streamed using Ustream. It included a chat which really made it interactive and exciting. People from all over joined the chat simply because Will put the link on Twitter. Some conference attendees in other workshops joined our chat. Very cool! I am going to play with live streaming over the summer and work to incorporate it into my classroom! Check out Will Richardson's wiki about ustream!

http://tvfored.wikispaces.com


The second session was simply Podcastic! I had been introduced to podcasting through my cohort, so this workshop helped me cement the steps. I am definitely going to implement podcasting next year! Good job N. Bentley and K. Mullen!

I cotaught Photo Story 3 the third session. It was a blast! The thing with this program is that it is so easy, you can walk out after an hour workshop and be totally ready to implement it into your classroom. I actually presented it to Birchie's staff a couple months ago and that was a 20 minute presentation. Staff members were very successful with it with just a little exposure. It is an intuitive, user friendly program!

This day was professional development at its best! I am already anticipating next year's Institute. I am wondering what new technology I will learn in the coming year that I will want to share. Thank you to all who presented and thank you to the leadership in our district for having such impressive vision!