#hashtag-o-rama

The snow is falling. No school today. I was looking forward to using Padlet.com with Mrs. Berman's Hebrew classes. That will have to wait for another day. Instead, I'm going to spend a few minutes to share some things I learned via #hashtags at #ice13 and #iledchat. The ICE conference took place last week in St. Charles, IL. The conference was amazing, as usual. It's always nice to see the people from your PLN face to face and catch up in person. The keynotes were inspiring, @mcleod shared some great ideas at the luncheon keynote and every other keynote made me want to get up and do something to get teachers excited about using technology in the classroom. The biggest message I took away from the conference is that it's about transformation and that all the apps or web tools you use won't matter if you don't transform your teaching. That's a tough sell. The tools are great and they will get you to your goal, but you can't use a tool and then put it away until you can do it again 3 units from now. While I get it that tools aren't the answer, there were still a couple that I really liked hearing about. Haiku Deck is the first one. You've seen the presentations with the slick slides and a few words, now I know the secret. This app let's you pick a theme, add some text, pick the pictures and the layout of the text, a few clicks and off you go. It's life-changing! Another tool, that I had seen at a couple of other conferences but actually used at ICE, was visibletweets.com. Visibletweets is a web app that pulls tweets up on a screen for display. You enter the hashtag or handle and the tweets come to life on the screen. The letters drop and bounce, very engaging. I used this to have on display during a presentation, but a teacher could used this if they have a hashtag that the students are following. It's fun. The third new activity I've experienced since ICE is to participate in a live tweet chat. Last night, I participated in #iledchat for the first time. It's a group of educators from around Illinois who all sign on to Twitter at the same time and follow the #iledchat hashtag. That's right, educators taking time at night to learn from each other. Lifelong learning at it's best.