Day One at ISTE

Our day began early with visiting the NASA playground.  It was amazing to see the resources that NASA has available for free for all levels of teachers to use.  We discovered the Dome, which will take students into a world of amazement depending on the lesson the teachers would like to plan for them.  The cost is not too bad for them to  visit a school for a day.  These are portable planetariums, which are located around the country for available for presentations.  Different program are available for different grade levels to use on the same day. Here is the website link  for more information  Discoverydome.   The prices may vary in different areas. 

Our next stop were poster sessions that were targeting the younger students.  We learned about Raspberry Pi , which is a microcomputer that is the size of  a credit card.  It is only $35.00 to get started!  Guess who will be learning about this as soon as we get home? Check out RasberryPi link here.

We went to Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality poster sessions. We learned about 360 cameras and using Google street view to create their own virtual tour of a any place that the student would like to learn more about.  You can create them and use an IPAD if you did not have virtual googles at your disposable.

Our next poster stop was to learn about Cospaces which is a free resource to create 3D augmented reality projects. We got an idea for a Snowglobe. 

Learning more about  how  Dash the robot was also an interesting poster stop, in which the college professor gave us a resource on how to use Dash in learning measurement.  She worked with her future teachers in creating a coding project lesson plan for them to teach in their assigned classroom settings. 

Our last stop of the day was at 2:30 to learn more about Virtual and Augmented reality resources.  This session was filled with numerous platforms to use with students.  Here are just a few of the resources given-- Cospaces, Google Expeditions, Round Me, Nearpod, 3DBear, Metaverse, FigmentAR, CatchyAR, StoryTab, LeoAR, Thyng and Shapes 3D.  It was a fast moving session with tons to ideas to use with kids.

We came back and crashed in our room for about 30 minutes then headed out to the keynote at 5:30.  There were three awesome speakers to energize everyone for the next few days.  The future is in our hands to inspire and give our students the tools that they will need.  That is all for today.  Tomorrow is another jammed packed day beginning early.