Monday, February 16, 2015

iPad Summit 2015

Last week, I had the extreme pleasure to co-present with my friend and colleague, JR Ginex-Orinion, who tweets at @gochemonline <---Instant follow! Our presentation was at the San Diego iPad Summit put on by EdTechTeacher.

That's a lot of links in those last two sentences, right? Here's one more: our presentation slide deck. Feel free to look through it and contact one of us if you have any questions.

Our session, Quick and Powerful Assessment Tools for the iPad, had the following goals:
  • share why it's important to use assessment tools
  • present four assessment tools
  • give attendees a hands-on experience with each tool
  • mention shortcomings and suggested uses for each app
  • provide time for Q & A
With about 120 attendees and an hour, we had our work cut out for us. However, I think JR will agree that we effectively met our goals and had fun with all the attendees. My intention is to share a few highlights from the session and not recap the whole thing.

Why?
My good buddy, Robert has encouraged me to address the "why" part of a presentation and I'm really appreciative for this encouragement. As we told the attendees, it's easy for us to show you what the assessment tools are and how to use them, but let's first focus on why we should use them.

We talked about why it's important to use assessment tools because they:
  • are a window (not a glass house) into student thinking
  • can tell a story about your students
  • should be informative (to guide your instruction) and
  • should be efficient
The tools we presented were:

I won't deny it. I think we saved the best for last. Pear Deck was definitely a crowd favorite. Ironically, we had to throw it in last minute because our originally planned tool, Infuse Learning, will be stopping their service in April. Pear Deck is such a great tool for capturing student thinking. I highly recommend you check it out and give it a test run in your class. 

All in all, it was a fun conference. I picked up some inspiration from Doug Kiang's keynote and Sabba Quidwai's session. More importantly, I look forward to presenting with JR again in the future sometime!

Summit,
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