Have I got the conference for you…

A couple of weeks back, I had the opportunity to attend and participate in the Florida Educational Technology Conference. Have you heard about it? Me neither…but apparently, it is huge! And for us technology lovers, it is the place to go. It is held in the Orlando every year around the middle of January and it draws thousands of educators from across the United States. So why do we not know about it? Here is why. Some people don’t think Physical Education uses certain technologies…hmmm.

This is one of my favorite finds and I went to a session on how to use them. Most interesting to me is when the presenter found out that I was a Physical Educator, he could not quite understand how we would use this technology in our classroom. I educated him. They are Student Responders. Student Responders are a handheld device with a series of buttons on the front. The teacher posts a multiple choice question on the interactive board and the students respond. As the answers come in, the teacher can see how many have answered. It will even tell how many have answered correctly and gives the teacher a variety of ways to display this on the wall. A pie, graph, cool smile faces. Students could potentially be involved in an activity. They hear a signal. This signal tells them, “get your responder now.” They look at the board. Answer the question, taking as much time as they need and when finished, return to their activity. Teacher gets instant feedback. Grade is downloaded to a sheet. There is even a place where the teacher can upload the information on where the question has come from in the teaching materials. Love love love this.

Interactive white boards are popular in most classes but in Physical Education, this can be a problem due to flying balls, targets on the wall, etc. The answer to this-the Air Slate made by DuKane. It is a handheld interactive board that talks to your computer, projecting on the wall through an LCD projector. It has quite a range…at least 20 yards I believe but the companies (both DuKane and Mimio makes these boards) say they work even further away. The problem comes with how easy it is to see the menu bar. Once you get the feel for where items are, this issue is not so significant.
Another activity I really liked was playing around with the ability to create and build lesson plans on the interactive board. My favorite was this pop up section:

Right there was this place where you use outcomes based objectives. What is it I want my students to understand by the time I am done teaching? Yes! Check out these great products!