Roseville GAFE Summit Resources

I got to present a couple sessions at the GAFE Summit in Roseville outside of Sacramento last weekend. And forgot to post the links to the resources. Whoops...

Here is the doc that had all the information for my Doctopus, Goobric, and Kaizena session. The passion based learning presentation is embedded below.

Napa 1:1 GAFE Summit Day 2 Resources: Innovation Day Resources

I had the honor to copresent about running Innovation Day at your school with my Humanities partner (and work wife) Sarah Press at the second day of the Napa 1:1 GAFE summit.

The session preso is embedded below - tons of links and resources are in there!

Napa 1:1 GAFE Summit Day 1 Resources: Doctopus and Goobric

I was lucky enough to get chosen to present at the Napa 1:1 GAFE summit on how to use Doctopus and Goobric to facilitate student document creation and feedback.

The link to the step-by-step instructions for running this script and extension is here. Plentiful screenshots included!

California Google Apps for Education Summit

Just found this post on my Google doc I write my blog posts on. It's from July. Whoops... Without further ado:

I had the good fortune to go to the California Google Apps for Education (GAfE) summit last weekend in Redwood City, CA. Without overselling how things went, I had an absolute blast. Why? Thanks for asking.

In a generally chronological order:

I opened the conference with a presentation by Rushton Hurley. If you haven’t had the honor of watching Rushton present at a conference, fix that. Soon. I left Rushton’s session completely energized - ready to run through about five walls to make a difference in the lives of my students.

The next day, I arrived at the conference and immediately bumped into Rushton. He was as excited as I’ve ever seen him about the upcoming keynote that morning, to be given by Richard DeVaul. Umm, wow. I didn’t know what Google[X] was before the keynote. Yes, now I want to go work for Richard!

The main message I got out of the keynote was the idea of Moonshot Thinking. In a poor approximation of its definition, moonshot thinking asks people to be bothered by the idea that they can’t do something. Think about that for a second: choose to be bothered that you perceive something to be impossible. How powerful is that? Richard’s push to fail publicly - and often - in the classroom and then to iterate really resonated with me. I will fail forward this year in my classroom, but also importantly model and be transparent about my failures with my students.

One of my biggest failures last year was my attempt to implement 20% time. I made a serious attempt to rectify those failings by attending sessions be Kevin Brookhouser and Kate Petty about 20% time. Kevin did a great job in his presentation demonstrating the need for 20% time in education today, then walking us through the steps he takes when implementing 20% time in his class. These sessions were exactly what I needed to more successfully do 20% time this year.

I also had the privilege of attending a couple of Donnie Piercey’s sessions Sunday as well. The most important takeaway for my classroom will be Google Newspapers. Umm, archived and searchable newspapers going back several hundred years? Yes please. From all over the world? Done and done. Wow. The possibilities in a social studies class...

I also attended Donnie’s session on Chrome extensions. A couple of my favorites? One Tab and goo.gl URL shortener (I’ve used the goo.gl website to do this in the past - this saves a couple steps).

The summit ended with a great closing keynote by Jim Sill, who struck the perfect mix of humor and intelligence.

Will I attend the California GAfE summit next year? Yes, most certainly. I am looking forward to this conference already - top notch presenters and killer keynotes.

But really, though, this conference was all about meeting people I had learned with online for a long time. I got to have hilarious Twitter conversations within sessions with Catina Haugen, Tracy Walker, and Harmony Hayes, three people I have followed on Twitter for a long time.

“Are you in this session? I think I see you.”

“I’m sitting near the door wearing a white sweater.”

“I totally see you. Let’s talk after the session.”

I absolutely love getting to meet people I follow on Twitter. It is so nice to get to place a name with a face. And with the growth of #caedchat, I feel like every time I show up at a conference I am going to see someone that I know. And by someone, I really mean someones.

I don’t want to sit here and list all the awesome people I got to hang out with at the GAfE summit. But it wasn’t a small group of people. Confession: one of my biggest fears is walking into a room where I don’t know anyone. Like it is on the list of things I fear the most, right along with heights. I wondered if this fear would be realized last weekend. Nope - couldn’t be further from the truth. I bumped into Edward Hilton - someone I’ve had numerous conversations with on Twitter - just walking into the opening keynote. This was a harbinger of things to come, and a definite #caedchat #EduWin!

And really, that’s what I was left with after the GAfE summit: a renewed sense that I am not the only one pushing this boulder up the hill. Whether it was the conversation with Lisa H and Karen on my way out of the summit Sunday afternoon or the chat with Lisa N before we started the festivities Saturday morning, I had a blast hanging out with my PLN in person.

And that, more than anything else, is what I took away from the California Google Apps for Education summit: being a connected educator is a whole lot of fun.

IFTTT: Instagram Hashtag Creates a Photo Blog Post

If This Then That (IFTTT) is a web service that links various disparate accounts - email, social media, storage, etc - and allows you to create automated actions if a defined event occurs. That is the worst description of IFTTT ever. Whatever. The front page of the IFTTT site says 'put the internet to work for you.' That's a way better description.

This post was inspired by a slam I saw Jeff Heil do at the California Google Apps for Education summit this past weekend. Jeff showed how he had created an IFTTT trigger for when he publishes a picture to Instagram with a certain hashtag, that picture will automatically get uploaded to a photo blog that he maintains.

This IFTTT recipe immediately got me thinking about a field trip I went on last year. The teachers asked the students to use a hashtag in Instagram photos as a way of getting everyone access to the pictures everyone took that day. It worked really well. So could those photos be stored forever somewhere - photos from any number of Instagram users - not just one like in Jeff's recipe? Like on a house blog? The answer: yes. How? Come along for the ride!

Step one: head to IFTTT and create an account. Then, create a new trigger.

Next, click on the giant blue 'this.'

You need to choose your trigger - the action that will prompt another action - next. There are a lot of choices in the trigger page. Find the Instagram icon and click that.

At this point, if you haven't used IFTTT before - or if you haven't used the Instagram trigger on IFTTT before - you'll need to link your account to IFTTT. Do that. 

You'll then have to choose what action you want IFTTT to look for in Instagram. You want it to look for a hashtag from any user.

There were ten choices of possible Instagram triggers associated with my account - you're going for 'new photo by anyone tagged.' Why IFTTT calls it tagged and not hashtagged is beyond me. Moving on.

Now choose an Instagram hashtag that you will share with your students. This is the hashtag that, if added to any Instagram photo by any user, will publish that photo to your website. PRO TIP: Go to Gramfeed and make sure that you have created a unique hashtag that isn't being used by other people - you don't want some random's pictures showing up on your website!

Click 'Create Trigger' and you're set. With the 'This' part of IFTTT. Next, choose the action your trigger will perform. Click on the giant blue 'that' and choose the action. After this, you'll be confronted with a bunch of choices again. You could have these hashtagged photos go to a Blogger, Tumblr, or Wordpress blog. Your choice.

I used Blogger and will walk you through those steps. After clicking on Blogger, you'll need to connect your account. PRO TIP: Create your new blog first before you get to this point, otherwise the blog you want photos to publish to won't show up. You want to create a new photo post.

Next, you need to format what your photo post will look like on your blog. Complete this screen to your liking to make this happen.

Then, click 'Create Action.' Then, on the next page - a review of your recipe - click 'Create Action' and you're good to go! I'm looking forward to what gets shared this year by my students - I think it will be a pretty cool way to hold onto memories from our year!

Just a note: this trigger won't work on old photos on Instagram - only new photos with the hashtag will trigger the recipe to run.

Happy photo-publishing!