VSTE

Virginia Society for Technology in Education

Live Events

G2 Super Hero Study Group and Summit Update

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The G2 Super Hero Summit includes online support for about a month prior to the face to face workshop.  It will include tips, support and live hangouts. The face to face meeting will be held March 3, 2018, at three locations in the state.

VSTE is pleased to partner with Virginia's Google Educator Groups to present the premier G2 Super Hero Summits! These certification workshops are designed for those who have earned Google Level 1 Educator certifications and wish to expand their learning by taking the Level 2 exam.

Through the combination of online mentoring and face to face coaching, certified trainers will support your learning through an online study group, video tutorials, live tutoring as needed and a face to face bootcamp style review the morning before you take the exam.

The face to face summits will be held at three locations throughout the state on March 3rd:

Frederick County: Lord Fairfax Community College, Middletown Campus, Middletown, VA
Loudoun County: Mercer Middle School, Aldie, VA
Spotsylvania County: Riverbend High School, Fredericksburg, VA

Registration is $50 and includes the online mentoring and face to face summit. Breakfast and lunch will be provided at the summits. You may attend the summit without taking the exam in the afternoon.

Registration is open now.

 

Learning Together at the VSTE Conference

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Attending the VSTE Conference is a great learning experience.

Attending with a team from your school or district can make that experience even better.

VSTE member Margaret Sisler came to the 2016 Conference in Virginia Beach with more than fifty of her colleagues and reflected on those three days in this post from last December.

Learning Together

Last week each school in our pyramid sent a team of educators (a mix of admin, teachers, tech coaches, and tech specialists) to the Virginia Society for Technology in Education (VSTE) annual conference.  This is our state conference, attended by over 1200 educators from all parts and regions of our state.  Presenters are educators, administrators, tech coaches, vendors and cover so many topics I couldn’t even list them all here!

I’ve been to VSTE many times and serve on the Outreach Committee.  I usually attend on my own and present a session or two.  Attending with a team was both awesome and sooo different than what I was used to!

Divide & Conquer: When I’ve attended on my own (or with a friend or two from another school), I’m usually very conflicted about what sessions to attend.  I was presenting 4 times this year, so that meant 4 sessions that I couldn’t attend and there were so many great offerings!  When there was a session I was super interested in, I asked if someone on my team could present.  It was incredible to work together this way because it meant we learned and gathered the resources from all of the sessions that anyone on our team attended.  We used a note-taking template that I got from my #TOSAchat friends.  I made a copy of the template for our team and we all added our notes to the template as we went.  My team took notes on one google slide deck.  Other teams from our pyramid took notes collaboratively in google as well and we all shared those notes.

Relationship Building: Being together with teachers, admin, tech coaches and tech specialists from my school and these 9 other schools allowed us to relax and really get to know each other and build connections.  THIS is what going to these conferences does for me.  I’ve now got this huge network of people that I can reach out to.  I KNOW that I don’t have the answers to every question, but I bet someone in this group does!!   We were also able to connect with folks from around the state who are deep in the work we are all doing.  It’s so interesting to hear this wider perspective.  We often get bogged down by the district way of doing it and this helps us to open that up view of things!

Read the rest of the post on Margaret's site, Edutechnically Speaking. VSTE thanks her for allowing us to share her experience with our members.

Margaret is an Instructional Technology Coach in Chantilly, Virginia.  She works in a large high school with over 3000 students and is passionate about building relationships with staff and students, engagement, Google Apps for Education and innovative teaching ideas! She is a former elementary teacher and has been a Tech Coach in both Elementary and High Schools. In addition to her blog, Margaret frequently shares her thoughts on Twitter: @TechyMargaret.

Registration for the 2017 VSTE Conference, December 3 - 5 in Roanoke, is filling fast. Plan now to join us.

If you write about learning and technology on your blog, related to the Conference or not, and would like to share one of your posts here at VSTE.org, we would love to hear from you.  Send us the link and your email address, and we will get back to you very quickly.

Playing in the Halls at the VSTE Conference

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Most education conferences have a typical structure, with one or two keynote talks for all attendees and the bulk of the time devoted to hour long lecture/demo sessions of varying sizes. Tech education conferences also feature longer, hands-on sessions.

At the VSTE Conference, we've been trying to shake up that model to encourage our members to interact with each other throughout the three days.


In the past few years we have been setting activities out in the halls, inviting people to stop, participate, ask questions and play. Like playing with robots or making collaborative music. Stay as long as you like with no set time commitment.

At this year's conference in Roanoke, we are planning two areas in the conference hall for these kinds of informal, interactive activities. Look for them in the program, or just stop by and join the learning.

In addition, we will be adding something new in the form of mini-unconferences. In the style of an edcamp, these will be sessions where the topics will be decided by you and the format is about conversation, rather than presentation.

All of this and much, much more will be packed into three days of great learning and collaboration at the Hotel Roanoke, December 3 - 5. Registration is now open, and it includes options for one or two days if you are unable to join us for the full conference.

We look forward to seeing you at VSTE 2017!

 

Student Showcase at the VSTE Conference

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One of the highlights of the VSTE Conference is always the opening day Student Showcase. Sunday afternoon we get to hear directly from students at area schools about what they are doing in their classrooms and how technology is making a difference in their learning and their lives.

From the 2016 Conference, here are a couple of examples featuring students in Virginia Beach schools.

First are some elementary students talking about the tools they use for collaborating with their peers on projects.

Next, some high school students talk about their robotics team projects and how they reach out to elementary schools to help them learn.

The VSTE Conference for 2017 is December 3-5 at the Hotel Roanoke and we are looking forward hearing from more talented students during the Sunday Student Showcase. Super early bird rates are only available for a few more days (until September 15), so make plans now to join us.

VSTE Keynote and Spotlight Speakers

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For the annual conference, we try to bring our members some of the most significant and influential voices in educational change. During the Sunday spotlight at VSTE 2016, we heard from Jaimie Casap, Google's Global Education Evangelist.

In his engaging and challenging talk, Jaimie discusses how our students will need to address global problems that we haven't even defined yet, and what we can do to help them learn the necessary skills to solve them.

Here is the video if you missed his talk, or if you would like to watch it again.

For VSTE 2017, our spotlight speaker will be Eric Sheninger, a Senior Fellow and Thought Leader on Digital Leadership with the International Center for Leadership in Education (ICLE). His work focuses on leading and learning in the digital age as a model for moving schools and districts forward. Sheninger is the author of the best selling book Digital Leadership.

At our Sunday spotlight we will hear from VSTE member Kim Wilkens, the founder of Tech-Girls, an organization with the mission of empowering girls to imagine and achieve their future in our tech-savvy world. Kim is the K-8 Computer Science Initiative Coordinator at St. Anne’s-Belfield School in Charlottesville.

Registration for VSTE 2017 is now open. Super Early Bird rates end soon, so make plans now to join us at the Hotel Roanoke, December 3-5.

One more reminder: the call for conference proposals closes in a little over a week, on September 15. Consider applying to be part of the conference.