Last week I was privileged to participate in the Upstate Technology Conference (UTC). Once again the technology staff of the Greenville, SC County School District did an outstanding job putting on one of best small educational technology conferences anywhere. It is also remarkable that in this era of shrinking budgets the folks in Greenville are able to offer this conference to all comers for free. Thanks should also be given to Discover Education for being the main sponsor of this event along with the other sponsors as well. UTC is always one of the highlights of the year for me and I would attend even if I did not do a presentation for them.

This year I presented the Flipped Classroom from the point of view of having tried it in my Computer Technology classrooms. Before I did my two sessions I was scared that nobody would come. The reason was Dr. Lodge McCammon, Director of the FIZZ Project at North Carolina State's Friday Institute, was the Keynote Speaker and his specialty is the Flipped Classroom. In other words, I was going head to head with a legend in the Flipped Classroom field. After watching him at both his keynote address and his two Flipped Classroom sessions I wondered if anyone would want to waste their precious development time with me when there were many other wonderful sessions going on at the same time? Lodge's arguments for doing the Flipped Classroom are essentially the same as mine: less time lecturing, more time with students, differentiation in the classroom, less discipline problems, research to backup his methods, etc.... The technique to create the lecture videos was fairly simple and probably within most teachers' comfort zone. Finally, Lodge is far more entertaining than I am. I did have one trick left up my sleeve, there is more than one way to skin a cat or flip a classroom. Lodge was kind enough to allow me to add his methods to my presentation for which I am grateful. My worries were groundless too because both of my sessions were full and all of the participants seemed satisfied with the variety of methods I shared with them. This week I will be working with a group of middle and high school teachers in Beaufort County in helping them create real lessons to flip their classrooms with the variety of techniques I have to share.

The other session was done by my good friend Shirley Smith on how Richland, SC School District Two is phasing in a 1:1 technology initiative in their schools. My own school district wants to provide iPad carts to core academic classes and I wanted to see how Richland Two did it. Except for a few exceptions that went iPad, most schools opted for Google's ChromeBooks. I got to play around with a ChromeBook while I was in Greenville and I can say it is a serviceable but limited device. Anything one does on the device must involve the Internet and Google Apps in particular. The biggest question is how a user could create and edit media on the device and I am sure there is an answer to that question (please feel free to answer in the comments if you know how). The other main question I had was how were teachers trained on how to use the devices effectively in the classroom. Richland Two is phasing in the devices over a three-year period and staff development is ongoing. Each school is assigned their own technology coach whose main job is to help teachers learn how to use the devices in the classroom. An independent group is studying how teachers are using the devices through classroom observations and providing feedback to the district on how to use the devices and what further training needs to be done. What about any teachers who do not get with the 1:1 program after the three years are up? Let's just say they will need to make sure their resumes are updated. Ouch!

Finally, the Discovery Education Star Educator dinner at the Wild Wing Cafe was a great event. If you use Streamline or any other Discovery media products in your classroom and find yourself sharing what you know about them then you should sign-up. There are a lot of great benefits to being a Star Educator (you must be a subscriber of Discovery to view this page) besides a free meal. Many of my best friends in the Educational Technology community are Stars.

As always, I had a great time at UTC this year. It is always great to see old friends and make new ones as I usually do in Greenville. I also look forward to coming back next year but one participant requested that I do a session on Edmodo. Fran, Tim, Jeff, and the rest of the UTC Staff considered yourselves warned. Thanks to you for a great conference!

My Video on the Flipped Classroom

Dr. Lodge McCammon's videoi on the Flipped Classroom

The 2011 edition of the Upstate Technology Conference just wrapped up for another year. UTC has become one of my favorite conferences because of the quality of the sessions and keynotes. This is the result of the hard work of the Instructional Technology Staff of the Greenville County School District. Not is this hard work done to provide quality educational technology training for Greenville teachers, they also invite anyone to attend free of charge. Those Greenville folks know how to share and collaborate!

I was fortunate enough to give two presentations. One was on using mobile devices in the classroom and the other was on using Edmodo to communicate with my students. In the session on mobile devices there was some great discussion among the participants. It surprised me that the group mostly accepted the fact that technology is becoming more mobile and it will filter into the classroom soon. The biggest discussion was around how to do manage students to make sure they stay on task. There was agreement with the analogy of when paper was introduced to students to use there was some resistance by teachers who feared there would be doodling and note passing going on. We don't see spiral notebooks be taken away and teachers have developed classroom management techniques to combat these problems but it has not gone away. Students texting each other just presents new challenges in classroom management but this group seemed up to the challenge. The group also thought about ways to incorporate the mobile devices and agreed that school-funded 1:1 initiatives will never happen. Parents are going to have to pony up the money. As far as Edmodo was concerned, this group was very accepting and liked the idea of a way to interact with their students online in a variety of ways safely.

When I was not giving presentations I was attending some to see what others are doing. With the large list of opportunities it was difficult to choose six to sit in on. One thing the planners of UTC did was to bring in some fresh ideas. While podcasting is a great classroom tool, do we need more of it? Sprint had an interesting idea of managing content with the Sprint ID Pack which allows IT managers to select which apps will be allowed for a business or school. This will need work if students are allowed to bring their own mobile devices but it is a start. The next session allowed me to see an application I am considering for Computer Tech 7 at Bluffton Middle School, goAnimate4Schools. It was good to hear how a teacher in Greenwood, SC used this application with her students. A session of some web applications stimulated my thinking towards looking at some more offerings for my Computer Tech 7 class. This might become a two-year class with all of the possibilities. I gave some time to the historian in me as I learned about the Library of Congress's program to video interviews America's war veterans to get their authentic story. I love researching primary resources in history and this would be a way to engage student to help create those sources for future generations. Finally, my good friend Shirley Smith reported on South Carolina's e-Textbook experiment. She brought two participating teacher from the project to tell their story. One had netbooks and the other had iPads with textbooks loaded on them. One thing that stuck out was that the teachers really did not need the textbooks when they had other resources at hand. While did not go to the session on QR Codes, from what I hear they may be over used by teachers. Turing-in homework assignments as QR Codes? Really?

I still have a lot to digest from the two days at UTC and will over the summer. I am also looking forward to next year as I get to always see old friends and make new ones. Thanks Greenville for your hard work!