IT IS NOT JUST FOR LITTLE KIDS BUT ALL !
We left our room at 8:15 and headed to Starbucks for breakfast. It was crazy and very crowded. They had at least 13 people working and was jammed packed with hungry early morning convention goers, trying to wake up before heading to the conference. After a very quick inhaling of our breakfast we headed to the conference to set up for our presentation at 10:00. We had a lot of teachers that were stopping by around 9:40 to gather information. We were non-stop until 12:00 sharing all the different things that we use in our classroom plus lots more. They were most interested in the Merge Cube, penguinscience, Wixie Seesaw, Dash, Osmo, and how we accomplish all the things we do with our little kids. We passed out close to 350 handouts and many other people just scanned our QR-code for our google doc resource. Jeanine met a representative from Epic books who was interested in how we liked it. He had a great conversation with Jeanine and other teachers in our poster area. He asked them how Epic could improve their product. Many ideas and suggestions were given to him and he was writing them all down. We find most of these tech companies are so approachable and really listen to what teachers need and use!.
We had a great time sharing with others. We met teachers from West Virginia, Zambia, Washington State, and Philly, just to name a few. We hope they came away with a lot of new ideas.
We visited the Expo Hall and discovered the following gems. Teachers First/Source for Learning is a non-profit service organization. It has a lot of free resources, the one that caught our eye was MySciLife to engage middle school science students. Another one was a a collaboration with the tech teacher and the art teacher using Sphero. We can see Leslie and Joe doing some fun things with this. Plus we scored a cool pen. :)
We found a start up company that provided free online tutoring for 8-12 grade students. We thought that looked great for our kids.
Our big find was Everfi which offered five different programs on Social and Emotional Learning. All of them are free and funded by Amazon. It focused on grades 1 through 8. This looks like a great resource for one of our new focuses.
We still have many areas in the Expo hall to explore tomorrow. Hopefully we can see it all.
We journeyed back to the hotel around 5:30 and sat to have a relaxing drink and snack in the lobby. We met a new friend who worked for Renaissance. She told us that the new reading series "Into" by Houghton Mifflin is teaming up with them to help us better understand the needs of our students. We just inform our Renaissance representative that we have adopted this new series and we will be able to receive valuable data from Star both from their testing and from the online "Into" work the children will be doing. Next year they will be teaming up with Sadlier to do the same analysis with our Math program.
Tomorrow is the last day of the conference, we have many sessions planned that we are going to attend before we leave to head home in late afternoon. We will post our finds when we return home. We hope to discovery many other resources to share.
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