CT GAFE Summit 2014: Day 1

A couple of weeks ago @fouss put out a tweet asking if anyone was going to the GAFE Summit in Louisville.  Having only recently figured out that GAFE stood for Google Apps for Education, I googled the GAFE Summit and was intrigued to find that there was one two weeks later at my alma mater, Manchester High School in Connecticut.  I put in a request and was given funding to go to the conference.

So this weekend, I spent two days jamming information about all thing techy and Google.  This post is attempt to download some stuff from my brain before I forget what I need to remember and take away from some excellent presentations.

Day 1: Keynote by James Sanders @jamestsanders
Very entertaining keynote. My favorite part had to do with the theme of failures and making mistakes.  He shared a url for a site to share your teaching failure stories.  I failed to write it down and have been unable to locate it.

Session 1: Beginners Guide to Admin Console by Peter Henrie
Very basics of setting up the structure of GAFE. I was relieved that some of the things I did but wasn't sure about turned out to be the right thing to do.  I probably really needed to go to the next session he offered, but was trying to spread coverage of what I was seeing.

Session 2: Digital Portfolios with Kern Kelley @kernkelley
This was awesome.  So much packed into this session on the process of getting work digitized and then developing digital portfolios.  He provided great resources explaining his process.  Digitized work all gets uploaded to Drive.  Older students then create Google sites with self-selected artifacts to emphasize.  I need to look through all he provided when I have some time.  I think our school could really benefit from digital portfolios. I made lots of notes during this session that I hope will make sense when I look back at them.

Session 3: I had intended to go to the Chrome Support for Struggling Readers and Writers, but it was unfortunately canceled, so I went to another session by Peter Henrie on 10 ways to drive Google Apps adoption.  A few takeaways here included Templates for your domain (turns out I didn't set this up, so our domain didn't have the ability to submit them.  It does now). Positive use for Google Apps is using a calendar to manage resources that need to be signed out. Great general utility share was on the Chrome extension called One Tab - this is for when you have like 24 tabs open it will condense all the open tabs to a list that you can then share as a webpage.  Also a recommendation to browse the edu section of the Chrome web store.

Session 4:  Google Tools and Universal Design for Learning by Denise Jaffe @djaffe0660
A few notes here NewsEla has articles at differing lexile levels, Dogo News (I don't remember why I wrote this down).  My favorite tip that I know I will use from this session was that in Sheets under Tools if you select research, you get a side bar on the right that you can do a search in without leaving your document and you can drag and drop images straight from this side bar into your doc and it will make a citation at the bottom of the page automatically.

Demo Slam
This was fun and energetic.  Sadly, I did not win a Chromecast or a Chromebook.