NJAGC’s Annual Conference

The New Jersey Association for Gifted Children (NJAGC) held their annual conference this past March at the Conference Center at Mercer. While I am not a member of the organization, my classroom-mate, Rebecca McLelland-Crawley, is and asked if I would be able to facilitate a session on technology integration. I said, “sure!”

Now last summer, when the teacher resource specialists for technology, a team which I am a part of, planned summer trainings my colleague, Kim Lowden, designed a Breakout EDU activity around SAMR. I thought this would be perfect to launch the session at NJAGC. I asked Kim if we could collaborate on this session (unfortunately, she was unable to help facilitate with me).

At the start of the session, I was introduced and asked if the announcement could end with, “I hope you are ready for an outside of the box session!” Hopefully it was. We started by breaking into the box which had the ‘key to effective PD‘ then we watched a video explaining Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition (SAMR). I tried to clear-up the common misconception of SAMR being a ladder, or linear progression in your instructional approach to technology integration. I used two infographics to showcase how somedays it’s perfectly fine to use technology for substitutional purposes. Then we did a scaffolded activity where the participants looked at various tech tools categorized in a SAMR Google Drawing. The initial task was to determine the ‘why’ & ‘how’ of a particular tool categorized the way it was. Then we worked up to filling in a Padlet where the participants took a tool they are familiar with and show ‘how’ it can be utilized at each part of SAMR. Check it out…

Embedded below are the Slides we prepared, underneath it is a video recorded by Roberta Braverman of the Breakout activity in action.

 

Cool tech session at annual conference. School friendly (like Escape room) tech trainer Dan Gallagher teaches us SAMR! Roberta Kaplan Braverman Alex Law Cilla Ricciardi Hernandez

Posted by New Jersey Association for Gifted Children on Friday, March 23, 2018

What was a session you recently facilitated or participated in which was outside-the-box? I would love to read about it in the comments below.

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