Chanatown

I'm currently at the Illinois Education and Technology Conference (IETC). I'll be presenting today on Screencasting later in the day, but first I enjoyed some moments from Dr. Gary Stager's keynote presentation. I've been a fan of Dr. Stager since I first heard him present - he's passionate, engaging, and a bit over the top (in a good way). For a detailed notes and tutorial site for my Screencasting session, click here . For my notes of some highlighted sessions, hit the jump.

I chose to go with a Pecha Kucha style of presentation for my Google+ Hangout, as part of Google's EducationOnAir series.  In my broadcast, I reviewed 10 Google Sites tips in 20 minutes.  That's a cool tip every 2 minutes!  Check out the replay and if you know the tip already, fast forward 2 minutes.  Fast, relevant, and useful PD.   Join me again on 12/10 at 4pm CST for another Google Sites preso, this time focusing on how to use the new Sites Layout and navigation features. For more thoughts on Teaching and Learning Technology,  please consider subscribing to the RSS feed or through email . Facebook fans - get the latest posts, thoughts, musings, and giveaways. Give us a "Like" today.

I was able to spend much of the morning working with an iPad app called Nearpod . Honestly, I was impressed with many of the capabilities, and I saw real potential to do great things with the shared iPad carts.  Essentially, Nearpod is an all-in-one presentation/polling application that allows users to deliver presentations to a group set of iPads. The interactive features include some traditional ones such as polling Q&A, self-paced student quizzes, and free response questioning.  However, the Draw It feature is easily worth the efforts of downloading and installing Nearpod alone. Students can ink on blank canvases or preset background images and submit their drawings to the teacher for review and potential sharing. Here are just a few examples that came to mind when I demo'ed the app to our teachers: annotation of text showing steps for math problems balancing chemical equations labeling maps translating sentences illustrating concept maps graphic organizers ...

Day two from the Google Midwest Summit .  No snow in the forecast today - it's sunny, blue skies and a crisp 42 degrees in the Dells.   Day one was a great experience both as a presenter and a learner.  I'm eager for another day of learning, and I'll be touching base with a few attendees from yesterday's session on Google Sites . Read on for more notes, links, and goodies picked up from day two.

Great day of sharing and learning at the 2nd Annual Midwest Google Summit (Wisconsin Dells, WI). I began the morning working with close to 100 attendees on creating and editing Google Sites . We had a lot of great ideas, questions, and I hope that everyone walked away with something new. With my presenter duties completed (thank you conference schedulers!), I got to sit back and enjoy the work of other presenters.  Hit the jump for some notes from the day one sessions.

This topic came up on our Google Certified Teacher Group and I was so excited to see that there was a possibility of pre-populating Google Forms (thanks E. Curts for the source link). With this capability, you can have fields pre-filled with specific data (like an email appendage), checkboxes pre-slugged, or address fields pre-populated (different forms for different states, cities, etc.). Lots of possibilities and just a minimal amount of legwork in adjusting the URL. Hit the jump for the Google support link and a 2-minute tutorial.