Creacamp

This one day conference hosted at Collège Beaubois in collaboration with École Branché allowed partificapants to deep dive into one subject of their interests for one day. Each area had mentors to guide participants in an activity. I chose the makerspace activity and it began with a discussion on the impact the maker mouvement has had on Collège Beaubois and how this has been reflected on the teahcers and students.

My final creation was this on the laser cutter

AccesEDU

AccesEdu is a three day conference hosted a l'Académie Lafontaine on November 3rd to 5th 2017.


The first day we visited classrooms and saw the school in action, I had brought my HTC Vive Virtual Reality kit and shared with students at lunch time the wonder of VR.

A few resources to share from the conference.

Peergrade.io is a great platform that combined with Google Classroom allows you to have students peer edit other students work.

Spiral.ac is a collaborative platform that also integrates easily with Google Classroom offering you a bunch of neat tools much like edpuzzle and quickfire questions.

Julie Chanberland and Julie Chandonnet made us live a BreakoutEDU

Ever wanted to try Sketchnoting, Marie-André Ouimet is awesome and here is her website La folie du scketchnote 

We also were announced the launch of Ludoka by a group of teachers that demand change in our education system in Quebec, Pierre Gagnon spoke passionately about this project and I can't wait to see how it develops. http://www.ludoka.org/

October 2017 Tech Tips - Comments in Google Docs

For those who like to leave comments on Google Docs, here is a new add-on called Check Mark. Once activated you can highlight text in Google Docs and a series of buttons will pop up. Each one will add a comment regarding a perticular issue, I included a PDF with the abbreviations. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/checkmark/kfddponboekcbjlhhjinkefjollhhidp/support

For customized commenting you can use Permanent Clipboard you will be able to right click and select Permanent Clipboard to write quickly pre created comments. You can use Permanent Clipboard anywhere in Google, so for adding comments in report cards this could save you some time.

Gsuite for Education Updates for 2017-18 School Year

This summer has been full of updates from Google. So I wanted to write up a short list:

1. Google Earth has been fully updated and is now available on the iPad as well as all Chrome browsers. This new streamlined version offers tours and tit bits of information on a whole bunch of locations. The interface is very clean and super easy to navigate in 3D.

2. Google Expeditions can now be run independently and has added annotations as an option allowing for exploration and analysis.

3. Google Classroom. 

                     a. You can now rearrange your classes in the class menu

                     b.  You can now see work by student simply click on a class, Students and click a name                             to see all their work in one place.

                     c. Google Form Quizzes auto correct and send grade to Google Classroom

                     

Here is a more comprehensive list made by google https://www.blog.google/topics/education/10-ways-were-making-classroom-and-forms-easier-teachers-school-year/

4. Google Backup and Sync, brand new tool to replace Google Sync, easier to configure and should be more efficient then previous app.

5. Jamboard, ios app that is like an shared whiteboard allowing for creative brainstorming, colloboration and you can bring in google elements all in one place. You don't need the actual board, the app runs on tablets, computer and phones as well.

A lot of other features have been added on in different apps but these were the major updates.

ISTE 2017 : San Antonio

So after a crazy week, I can finally talk about how huge ISTE 2017 was this year.

With about 21000 people in attendance from teachers, tech integrators, vendors, presenters, volunteers, etc... the event really shines because of the sheer amount of people that you can meet during the four days.

The Expo Hall is really big, and I mean really big:

We got to meet a whole bunch of vendors and get a lot of swag. Thanks to the guys at IPevo, i-Ready, Microbit and Google for getting us to great stuff.

On the first morning of the conference, I had the oppertunity to go to a CoffeeEdu, a concept created by Alice Keeler @alicekeeler ,


Its sort of like an unconference of people to discuss any issues, we were so many that just doing greetings took the whole time we had. But gathering so many people at 6:00am demonstrates that the Ed Tech tribe is very keen at getting together and sharing.

We also had the pleasure of hearing Jennie Magiera @MsMagiera as a keynoter, here is a sketchnote of her talk by Marie-Andrée Ouimet @maouimet.

Of course San Antonio is home to the Alamo, the Spirit of Freedom. So getthing a tour was really interesting from a history perspective. And the River Walk is a beautiful walk filled with great shops and restaurants.

I did a presentation on an Introduction to Virtual Reality in the Classroom, here is the link to the slidedeck.

Of course meeting with all the other delegates from Québec was a threat and allowed us to discuss and talk about what we could do when we get back to keep the conversation going. Of course thats what its all about, the people you meet, the connections you make and bonds you keep allow you to grow both professionally and personally.

photo credit to Jaime Casap @jcasap

ISTE 2017 Presentation Slides

I will do another post about everything I saw at ISTE 2017, but for now here are my slides from my presentation:

Intro to VR in the Classroom

Tech Tips May 2017

Here are some tech tips to enjoy during your long weekend.

1. Wanna learn the basic of electronic music creation, you can explore Ableton's website for new interactive lessons on the basics. Ableton is a software Adam uses in his classes so if you want to explore this in more detail, we are lucky to have an expert on staff. https://learningmusic.ableton.com/index.html

2. Classroomscreen: this is small web app that allows you to put a clock, timer, instructions, QR code on the board for students to see and keep tabs of what they should be doing. http://classroomscreen.com

3. Series of 4 documentaries on different web terms and some things to be mindful of when navigating the internet. This is more for you to be aware not really about scaring you.

a) Profiling-:What facebook knows about you?

b) Prices

c) Machine Learning

d) Artificial Intelligence

https://www.propublica.org/article/breaking-the-black-box-what-facebook-knows-about-you

4. Microsoft Translator: Much like Google Translate, Microsoft can take photos of text and translate it, type or speak and word, but now it also does two way simultaneous conversation translation between two languages automatically. Available on PC, MAC or IOS https://translator.microsoft.com/

5. VLC Media Player which is installed on all our PCs at the school has some nifty functions check out this video to learn 12 cool things such as Screen recording, file type converting, etc... 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TTwBwQunwE

6. Love taking photos with your phone, Apple has just prepared a series of videos on how to shoot better with an iPhone 7, now even if you don't have an iphone 7 plus, a lot of the tricks still apply. https://www.apple.com/iphone/photography-how-to/ 

7. Gmail Smart Reply, over the next coming weeks a new feature called Smart Reply is rolling out for Gmail on IOS,  depending on the text in the email, Gmail will make suggestions as to what to answer back as a response. https://blog.google/products/gmail/save-time-with-smart-reply-in-gmail/ currently available in English with more languages coming soon.