Leadership Academy @ TCEA13

Another full day at TCEA13 and once again they lost my number for the door prizes.  The keynote this morning was delivered by Greg Green (@flippedclassroom) one of the pioneers in the concept of the flipped classroom.

In the keynote and in his later presentation he reminded us of some key points to remember when getting started with a flipped school.

1. Start with just a few teachers.
2. Have them start with one subject/class.
3. Share the load-you don't need to create all the videos on your own.  There are many other resources out there like YouTube, Gooru Learning, Khan Academy, Brain Genie, SchoolTube or TeacherTube that can be used to find videos.
4. Think of it like eating an elephant.  You want to do it a little at a time.  

All of these are things we know, but when facing something new we forget to take it a little at a time.  We forget to start with the simple tasks and build up to the more complex.  Pick your analogy and apply it here.

Models of Tech Integration was a great presentation that provided me with some valuable tools about evaluating the level of Tech Integration in a classroom.  +Roland Rios  (@drrios) and +Miguel Guhlin  (@mguhlin) led this session and shared four different models for evaluation.  TPACK, SAMR, LOTI, and TIM were all mentioned and quite a bit of time was shared about the first two.  I really like the information provided with the TIM method because it provides examples of what it might look like at each level in each subject.  The SAMR method would probably be the format I would follow during classroom visits.

I also attended Getting the Most Out of Your Social Media led by Vickie Echols (@VickiePT) and +Roland Rios.  This session was a good walk through about establishing a social media presence for your district or school in a way that is easy to maintain, transition to new leadership and be an effective outlet for disseminating information to your community.  Very informative and reminded me of some techniques that any administrator would find useful.

The final session I attended today was Developing a Community of Technology Experts: Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks.  This session was much like a professional wresting tag team match with all the wrestlers on the same team.  Throughout this presentation the speakers (I believe there were six of them) alternated back and forth sharing different components of the presentation.  This was great because it gave the perspective of several different members of the school faculty that were involved in a 1 to 1 iPad initiative in an elementary school.

In all, a great day.  Looking forward to more tomorrow.