MCTE Conference.

The MCTE Conference was great, and I think it was as beneficial if not more so than when I went the first time, and when I was there I was already looking into what I needed to do to become a member when I become a real teacher.

First off, the Keynote speaker gave a great talk about technology in the classroom, and it was really interesting to hear her talk because I really got the impression that the people she was mainly walking to were people much older than me. The thing is, I've been around computers and other technology my whole life, I'm part of the new generation she was talking about, and most of the computer resources she was referencing were things I've already heard about or used myself. It was still incredibly interesting to see how the general conception of technology in the classroom is evolving and to see how the importance of it is still growing. I've been thinking about it a lot since she reference Pandora and I've really been wondering how easy it would be to make use of a system like Pandora for Literature. I mean, Amazon.com actually sort of already does this, when you purchase or check out a story from them they have the ability to suggest to you many other stories that are similar to the ones you looked at, and I think it would be amazing to refine this process and give people a suggestion engine for books that took an aggregate composite of the different characteristics of books that they enjoyed!

I myself have been looking quite a bit lately at different ways to involve video games in the classroom, or just simply using the structure of video games to help some students connect. I can still remember to this day having Civilization 2 installed on all the computers in my middle school and I know the ancient day wonders of the world, the Colossus, The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, The Oracle of Delphi, Sun Tzu's Art of War, all because of that game. There is so much potential in other forms of media and we as teachers are just beginning to scratch the surface.

One of the other interesting sessions I went to was one that was helpful to new teachers, a session dedicated to offering advice for surviving your first year. Most of it was common sense but it was helpful to hear about the different strategies starting teachers use to find a good mentor and the things they did to survive.

Probably my favorite session was one that was actually meant for teachers who had been teaching for a long while, and it focused on common assessment. The best thing about sitting in on this session was that normally, all I get to hear about are the things they tell new teachers, and the strategies I can use to get students interested, but it was SO HELPFUL to hear for once about the inner working of the school. These teachers were talking about the different things they do to successfully negotiate with their administrators different kinds of common assessment, and how they make use of the State guidelines and the school guidelines to do so. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, one of my biggest fears is getting into a classroom and not having a problem knowing how to teach, but having a big problem knowing what to teach, so it was nice hearing a lot on that subject.