I spent Thursday and Friday at the Nebraska Educators Technology Conference, held not far from my home. I enjoy going to conferences, despite being gone from my students, because of all the ideas I get from like-minded professionals.
But then reality smacks me in the face and all my ideas end up as archived scribbles that stay in binders and never again see the light of day.
It’s sad, really–the whole point of these conferences is to improve my teaching. But I’ll get back in my room tomorrow and give a Reading EO, listen to Speech EO makeups, work with my AP kids to get them ready for the AP test, and try to cram two weeks of a film unit into five days, since the seniors in my Pop Culture Studies class have seven days remaining in my class. That doesn’t leave a whole lot of room or opportunity to try backchannels or blogs.
So I have a plan to try and implement all of these great ideas I gleaned from the conferences I’ve attended this year. Phase One: sift through the notes, compile the ideas, and post them in a separate page on this blog.
Phase Two: select one idea and do it. In a session run by Apple, I learned that I can create an eBook using Pages (which, thanks to the App Store, I can download). Well, I’d already started putting together a loose textbook for my Popular Culture Studies class. I’m going to transfer my work to Pages, save it in ePub format, and make it available for students to download to their iPod Touch devices when they take my class next year.
If I can do one–just one–great thing I learned this school year, the time away from my students will be worth it. I hope.
