EdCamp NJ 2012

I am apart of a fantastic group of innovative and impressive educators in New Jersey that organized EdcampNJ. I arrived late due to a previous engagement but this was still a great un-conference. This event was based on the unconference model such as Edcamp - Philly, Edcamp - Harrisburg and Tabcamp -NJ, where the participants/attendees of the conference created the conference. These workshops are more conversational rather than a presentation because many workshop attendees participate within the presentation of the topic.  There were teachers, techies, librarians, administrators, aspiring administrators, musicians, etc, present to get or provide professional development on topics that were of interest to the participants. It was great to see Principal El from Delware. We attended a workshop about involving our parents and community in social networking. The discussions included how to get teachers to use social media in the classroom, the need for administrators to model using social media within the educational community and the importance of using services such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. during times of emergency. Everyone had a great time. There were many prizes including an iPad mini device. It was an honor to be involved with such an awesome set of educators. The EdCampNJ website can be found at EdCampNJ.   Join us next year at Linwood Middle School, North Brunswick, NJ on November 23rd, 2013. See you there!

NJASL 2012 Conference

        I presented at the annual New Jersey Association of School Librarians (NJASL) in Long Branch, NJ on Saturday December 1st along with Michael Ettore, Principal of Asher Holmes Elementary School and Kimberly Alexander Supervisor-Instructional Technology, Media and ESL. Our topic was Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) explaining what it is, why many districts are adopting this mode of integrating technology in the learning process, what are some of the issues that is associated with BYOD and the process Sayreville Public Schools took in developing it's own BYOD program. Michael and Kimberly presented 2 great projects that their students created in Animoto using their own personal devices they brough to school. Questions in audience included district responsibilities for these devices, discipline issues in the classroom, the instructional process in the classroom, filtering of websites and being CIPA compliant, etc. My presentation can be found on SlideShare.

     After the presentation, I attended a presentation done by Barbara DeSantis and Katie Llera, teachers from the Sayreville School District. They explained how students used iPads to create movie trailers for books they had read in the library. They additional spoke about creating QR Codes for these trailers and other websites to link the books to additional resouces. One project they mentioned was how they created QR Codes for teacher websites of the Middle School. These codes were then placed on the doors of the classrooms so that during parent conferences parents could scan the codes and it would link them to the teacher websites so that the parents could see the teacher's websites. There was lot of energy by both presenters and participants.
This is always a great conference to attend.