ITEC 2012

Today we had almost 100% of our staff at the Iowa Technology Conference in Des Moines! ITEC is one of those inspiring and idea filled conferences that I have attended for many years. But, to have a Mid-Prairie person there each time you turned around was pretty cool! I hope people experienced new understandings and we have a chance to share those with one another.

We did have two presenters from our midst today... Amber Bridge led a workshop called, "From Pilot to Flipcon12" about her journey flipping her 8th grade science classroom.  She shared her findings comparing a pilot group and a test group, the tools she used and her vision for the future of her flipped science classroom.

I, Beth Swantz, also presented. My talk was, "Technology Mentorship."  It was was a crowd sourcing workshop where we spent time creating a document sharing our common knowledge and helping one another.  It was incredibly cool to see the document grow as the workshop progressed!  Check it out here: iTech Mentoring.  You can copy this URL and add it to your google docs to gain info - or even better yet  - add your ideas to the doc.  The power of mentoring to me is realizing that we all have so much to offer to one another!

Amber and I created a website that includes both of our presentations and other supporting details.  Check it out MP TECH TALKS.

Genius Board

An example of a "Genius Board" for technology

Tom Many - PLC Professional Development

Professional Learning Communities -
PLCs

I really didn't know much about PLCs and the parts I did know were pretty fuzzy - at least that's how I felt Monday morning. But by the end of the day my understanding had increased. Tom Many's experience as superintendent of a large Illinois school moving along the path of PLCs was a great help in that understanding.  I appreciated his mix of stories and facts - it created a picture of what the possibilities of this are.

I think Mid-Prairie also made an impression on Tom.  We had asked if it was ok to have a Twitter feed on the side screen during the morning and if the staff could have digital copies of his presentations.  This was the first a school had made either of these requests, and he agreed.
At the close of the morning's session we posed a twitter challenge to the entire staff - tweet out remaining questions about PLCs.

This turned out to be a great way to close a large group session and transition into our smaller planning group in the afternoon.  Rather than work from the prepared slide deck of powerpoint slides, Tom worked from the tweeted questions.  It was a practical and focused conversation with the Instructional Leadership Team.  And this was Tom's tweet at the end of the day!

Have to say it was a great day all the way around!!