Learning @ 2016 Fall CUE

Although I am still exhausted, my neurons are still firing with ideas sparked from the 2016 Fall CUE Conference. I participated in an unconference session on Friday, and two concurrent sessions on Saturday. Heading into the conference, I had planned to attend sessions about coding and badging. There were plenty of sessions to attend, about these two topics.

​​On Friday, after the close of the last scheduled concurrent session, @johnpatten and I were treated to a unconference session about the Hyperduino from its creator, Roger Wagner. We discussed and explored the student learning activity possibilities of the hyperduino, mutimedia, and Chromebooks. Roger demonstrated several projects that are steeped in content while offering students the opportunity to practice problem-solving and coding skills.

Before I could get to my seat in my first scheduled concurrent session for Saturday, I bumped into @CLipsig. We engaged in an EdCamp moment as she shared about her classroom's recently acquired Cozmo, including the homegrown funding model to acquire the robot.  

This conversation by listening to some great lesson ideas for Raspberry Pi. The Coding a Pi concurrent session covered all the basics of getting started with a Raspberry Pi along with links to some great coding ideas and student samples.

My final session at the conference was a lesson on sketchnoting. These visual notes have always been great to look at, but I have avoided them because drawing is a talent that I have not developed yet. I appreciated that the session provided guidance on getting started (the five basic shapes plus the blog). The session also included some guided practice and some great curricular ideas for getting started.  I am currently in the process of trying out touchscreen Chromebook apps for sketchnoting.

Overall, I would say that I benefited from both the informal and formal conference sessions. The formal sessions piqued my interest in some new topics, while the informal sessions and discussions allowed me to further my knowledge in other areas. In addition, the FallCUE Game also prompted me to explore some new topics and set some learning goals for myself too.