Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Highlights from TCEA 2016

Blanca, Karen, and I arrived in Austin (Texas) the evening of February 1st ready to learn all that TCEA (Texas Computer Education Association) had to offer.  After 4 days, 17 sessions, one presentation, and multiple vendor visits, we were exhausted.

We were so ready to learn; we even had an 8am session on day 1 which led to a most interesting bus ride...



The session we almost didn't make that morning was on coding.  It is quite trendy to do in libraries these days, and we wanted to see what the hubbub was about.  It was a good session, by the way. Here is a link to that... Launching a Coding Club with Confidence.


Here are a few more highlights from our trip.

My favorite person to see while at TCEA is Tammy Worcester Tang.  She always has a session to introduce new technology tools.  I think my favorite apps she introduced were Photo Math and Google Translate.  Her website is a gold mine of technology ideas, tammyworcester.com.  The session I attended was Tammy's Favorite Tech Tips, Tricks, and Tools.  For all who love technology, you should check out these links.

My next favorite session came from a trio of ladies outside the Austin area.  They covered Marzano & GAFE (Google Apps for Education).  Here is the link to their PowerPoint. I enjoyed this one because of the McREL training I attended recently in our district.  McREL uses Marzano's 9 strategies in their program.  So this was a timely presentation for me.

In addition to these 2 presentations, I also enjoyed the Makerspace session that was organized by the librarians in Lancaster ISD.  I am always fascinated by this topic, and these ladies did a great job presenting what they have done.  Here is a link to their Makerspace presentation.  What I enjoyed most was that the librarian presenting was well into her 60s.  She understands that if libraries don't transform to what their users need, there will be no library.  Not as many librarians as you would think understand this.  It was refreshing to see a veteran librarian out there leading the cause.

Another session worth mentioning was the Google CS First website.  Google now has computer science clubs ready to go.  All the information and resources you need are organized on this site. Granted many of these clubs are targeting the K-8 audience, but we are going to take a look at these anyway.  What a great way to encourage computer science and get the support you need.  Looking for a computer science club?  You really need to check out this site.

Since I went to 17 different sessions, I am not going to annotate all of them.  Here are some of the other noteworthy presentations I attended.  Unfortunately not everyone's presentation was online.  So I was only able to link to a few.


Of course I am going to mention our presentation as well.  I believe we did well.  There were probably 30-35 teachers there.  Our presentation was "eBooks: Check Us Out."  




I'm not sure how much new information we gave, but I think we gave comfort in the fact that we are struggling with this platform.  It is not as popular with the millennials as we have been led to believe. In our experience, the students don't mind having digital books when they are researching; it is easier to find the information they need.  However, when asked to read large chapters or whole books, they prefer print.  This would be text books and fiction books.  It is interesting that many librarians are experiencing that as well.

Back to the presentation...When we realized that we were going to throw some free advertising to some of our vendors, GALE, Follett, Barnes and Noble, and Capstone, Blanca contacted our reps to let them know what we had planned.  All 4 of our vendors donated enough SWAG for everyone in our audience.  So we felt pretty good about this....definitely an "Oprah" moment.



In addition to all of the tech sessions, we did carve out some time to go to the bottom floor and visit with the vendors.  We ended up with all kinds of SWAG.  My favorite freebie was a selfie stick.  We were all given one if we dressed up, used the selfie stick to take a picture, and then posted that picture using the scholastic hashtag.  It was my first time to use one.  How did I do?



Overall, we had a great time.  It was definitely an "information overload" experience, but we look forward to this great conference every year.

Thanks for stopping by!



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