TCEA – Austin, Texas

Got back late Friday night from TCEA, the annual state conference of the Texas Computer Education Association. The conference was exciting and tiring as usual, but it was great to see so many friends and Generation YES teachers who stopped by to say hello.

A highlight for me was a session called, My First Year with Generation YES given by Lisa Rogers at Forney Middle School. It was a very early morning session, but quite a few hardy souls got up early to hear her tell about her journey with her GenYES students as they learned to help teachers with technology.

Lisa showed examples of student projects using web development tools, interactive PowerPoint quizzes, and video. One of the GenYES projects linked unitedstreaming videos to the career and technology textbook so that the teacher could easily get the videos as they taught each lesson.

It’s a great example of student-powered, student-centered technology. Not only did this teacher get a reusable resource that enhances student learning, the school got more benefit from a technology resource that they had already bought and paid for.

Thanks to Lisa and her GenYES students, Forney is really reaping the benefit of the technology investments they’ve made.

Later that day, I led a session called Students Providing Tech Support – The 21st Century A/V Club. It was a chance to have a terrific conversation with educators who are either thinking about having students help with tech support or already have something going. This is a fun session, because it is interesting to get people together who think that they are the only ones out there doing this! The dirty little secret is, lots of schools have students helping out informally.

Of course, I talked about our tools and curriculum to support student tech support teams, Generation TECH. But there are lots of things we discussed that are free that schools can do to create opportunities for students to help maintain the quality of technology.

You can read Wesley Fryer’s notes taken during the presentation at his blog, Moving at the Speed of Creativity. Wesley’s summary is kind of funny, a stream of consciousness ramble. I don’t know if he was taking notes by hand or not, but he’s FAST and got most of the big picture. Thanks, Wes!

It was great to meet Wesley in person and have a chance to talk about blogs and education. He gave me some very good advice about this blog as well! I hope to be able to implement some of the ideas in the near future.

Sylvia

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