GAfE Summit San Diego

Anyone who knows me knows that I love all things Google. And what could be better than Three days of Google!
Friday 10/3: Google Education Trainer (GET) Workshop with Sergio Villegas. Great review and additional info about all of the Google Drive pieces. Tip 1: create custom search engines for each unit so kids are not distracted by off topics results. I created a search engine just for animal research  with National Geographic, National Geographic Kids, and San Diego Zoo. When I tested it by searching the word "frogs" I came up with over 1100 entries! So even limiting students to specific resources will still give them a lot to choose from. Fun Challenge: Sergio gave us a couple photos during the day and we needed to use our google skills to find the address of the location or what kind of animal was pictured. After we found it we discussed the search terms we used to find it.
Saturday 10/4 and Sunday10/5: Long days at Coronado High School with 400 other teachers all learning and sharing how to integrate technology. 100s, if not 1000s, of tweets and status updates were posted over the weekend. Take Aways: 1. connect through Twitter more often than at conferences. Teachers are awesome at sharing. 2. Google Hang Outs are cool and will have a ton of uses from Mystery Career Calls to Virtual Field Trips. 3. Close reading will be fun with the Text Talk Study Skills Add On. Students highlight vocabulary and key ideas and then can 'collect the highlights' into a separate document. 4. Google Forms have undergone a huge update and we now have tons of design choices and can upload our own images. You can also embed video into a form. I'll be posting ways I will use these tips over the next few weeks. I love EdTech!