It is hard to believe that my last blog post on here was nearly 1 year ago.  What the heck have I done with the last year?  In a few words:  a TON!

My first year teaching in a 1:1 iPad school gave me some serious clout to try new things, and I did!  I tried without fear of being looked down upon, I learned great new things, and I tried lots of new strategies.  And since being out of school for almost 2 months, I haven’t stopped thinking about school.  I just can’t shut my learning off the way some people can.

I continued to learn all summer long from my PLN.  I signed up to attend the “Take Personalize Learning to the Next Level” conference in Oregon last week.  It was at this conference that I had the opportunity to try out the idea of Sketchnotes.  This is a strategy that I want to use with my students this year, so I figure I better have some experience with it.

 

One thing that I learned.  I definitely need to practice capturing what people actually look like!  I know that I’m capable, but it just means that I need to take some time and practice.  The big idea with sketchnotes is that it forces you to listen for big ideas.  Instead of furiously writing outline style notes, this allowed me to connect what I was thinking, seeing, and hearing all at the same time.  Pretty powerful.  And although I didn’t share out any awesome takeaways during the sessions on Twitter, just sharing my sketchnotes was enough.

After the Personalize Learning conference, I “attended” the QuestBoise virtual conference and listened to 4 streaming webinars about gamification in the classroom.  I also drew sketchnotes for those, but found a few of the webinars to be dull as I had already had a fair amount of background knowledge.  Something I took away from this processes though, was that if I allow myself to drift, my attention diverts pretty quickly.  When I wasn’t sketching in my notebook, and checking social media, I lost a lot of information.  Sometimes it is better to disconnect and focus.

As if I wasn’t busy enough with planning curriculum, cleaning out the Science store room, and thinking about gamification, I also took some time to explore building a classroom app.  So far I’ve spend about 7-8 hours playing with AppShed, which is an online, drag-and-drop type of interface that allows you to build an app for mobile devices.  AppShed is completely free and doesn’t cost a dime to build a web app.  If I wanted to put it on the Apple AppStore, I’d have to pay the $100/year developer fee in order to do so, and I’d be afraid as how often I would need to “update” the app.  I’m really hoping to continue building the app to allow my students to use it while they work, but that would mean updating daily or weekly.

Next week I will be taking my first “official” class of the summer.  I’ll be participating in the Making Sense of Science: Heredity course that is being offered from the Madison Metropolitan School District.

Oh my, there is still so much to do before school starts again!