ACTEM 2014

If you are a technology minded teacher, I would highly encourage you to check out the agenda for the 2014 ACTEM conference, which is next month in Augusta. It is now a full two day conference and you can attend for just one day or for both. Here is the email that just came out about it:

This year's ACTEM conference theme is Rebooted and Reimagined. Not only are we rebooting our technology, we are reimagining the conference too!

The ACTEM conference is now a full 2 day conference on October 9 & 10 at the Augusta Civic Center.

Both days will include morning keynotes, 1 hour sessions, ½ day sessions and full day sessions.

The ACTEM Educator of the Year and Leader of the Year will be announced and recognized at the Thursday afternoon reception as well.

Check out the full slate of session descriptions here: https://sites.google.com/a/sad4.org/actem2014/home

Registration is open at: http://actem.wildapricot.org/event-856891 The early bird rate ends on September 18.

The committee has been working hard to make sure there is something here for everyone!

And, just in case you can't get enough of me, I'll be presenting two sessions this year:

• Thursday, Block 1: Classroom Blogging with GAFE - Suzanne Simmons, MSAD #6
  By using Google's Blogger in combination with GAFE, we'll set up a classroom blog that you can easily use with students to document anything that you can imagine. Book reviews, science experiments, solving math problems, music... the list is endless! With no hidden expenses or accounts beyond your GAFE login, it is an easy way to get started creating a blog as private or public as you want it to be.
  
  In this workshop, we’ll look at how to start a classroom blog very easily with Google Apps for Education. The students submit their reviews through a Google Form and it automatically transfers the entry to the teacher’s blogger account as a draft post where they simply review the post and hit publish. It makes it easy to do and the students love seeing their work online. This one could really go for beginners or advanced, but I'd recommend a basic level of comfort with technology.
• Thursday, Block 2: Gaming in the Classroom - Suzanne Simmons, MSAD #6
  Gaming is no longer something that distracts our students from the task at hand; sometimes it IS the task. In this session, we'll explore the research that shows us how valuable gaming can be at motivating our students to get them to achieve and aim higher. We will spend time looking at ways you can implement gaming from easy to use apps/sites to more complex systems (depending on your own) comfort level and then get started making it happen.

Let me know if you are interested!