#ASTE2016 Reflection

Published on February 26, 2016

Attending the Alaska Society for Technology in Education Conference in Anchorage, Alaska this week was a fun opportunity for me.

##Sharing my Learning

If you follow me, you probably saw some of the podcasts that I did with some of the speakers at that conference. Going to conferences and being able to learn from and share more stories from those that are there is one of my favorite parts of conferences. I hope you learn a lot from them. Here they are again:

Frederick Lane: Cybersafety and Cybertraps. Episode 110 & Episode 111

Cory Doctorow: How to live in our challenging times and prepare our kids for the future: His Episode

Carl Hooker: Digital Leadership and working with your faculty to help them be the best. His Episode

##Slack

We had about 18 people from our district at this conference, and we used the Slack app to help us communicate with each other. I’ve used slack before and it is really an amazing app. It helps keep everything contained and focused. There were a lot of cool resources that others found that they shared from their sessions.

#Takeaways

Here are some of my takeaways from some of the sessions.

##Leadership Workshop

Multitasking is the art of doing twice as much as you should half as well as you should. Carl Hooker gave some really good advice to us about how to keep things moving, and how to support teachers with brain breaks. How can we raise the ceiling of learning for our students?

##Keynote - Stumpenhorst

Josh Stumpenhorst talked about helping kids be the center of what we do with them.

  • Advocates bringing kids into every decision and getting their feedback about what they think of it.
  • Adults are always the problem when it comes to kids.
  • Adults are often the solution.
  • Innovation day - 1 day per year. What if every day was innovation day?

##Cory Doctorow!!!

Cory talked about the need to pay attention to our digital rights and to be vigilant in what systems we adopt.

  • Hospital is a computer we put sick people in.
  • How do we balance the support of our teachers and kids (managing devices) and allowing their computers to be helpers?
  • Air gaps are not really there.
  • Every pirate wants to be an admiral.
  • Even though I don’t know how to solve your problem, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t tell you that it is a problem.
  • The Crypto party project. Australia
  • Phishing - Malware as a service.
  • Network filters - Can’t write a regular expression that is good enough. If you teach kids to enforce their privacy online they run into a wall, because of their position.
  • Teach kids to learn how to research: Student body’s knowledge
  • Need Responsible, compassionate grown ups to help kids grow up in our digital age.

##Michael Fricano

Michael shared some really great resources about Google Docs add-ons. I’ll just direct you to his web site for more information.