2024VSTE Virtual Conference

In this session, teachers (and administrators) will navigate Canva and interact with the many features it provides. Everyday usage is the focus of this session - attendees will leave the session with a free, full-access educator account, and tips and tricks to use Canva immediately in various ways, from enhancing classroom experiences or professional development, to generating newsletters, to creating email signatures, and more!

Come be inspired by innovative lesson ideas for elementary aged students utilizing a iPads within the curriculum and new SOLs. We will give many examples and tools of how students can ?justify? their answers using their iPads! You?ll walk away with ideas on how to use iPads as a tool to transform and innovate lessons as well as how to engage students with simple lesson tweaks! All ideas will be related to the free Apple Apps as well as features already on the iPad itself. No subscriptions or paid apps required! Come be inspired to transform your lessons, get your students justifying their answers and walk away with ideas to use tomorrow!

Student engagement is a vital ingredient of classroom learning and academic excellence. Yet, this is also the area where many educators struggle, especially when it comes to choosing the right EdTech tool(s) for your classroom. During this session, we?ll explore strategies and ideas to better engage your students along with specific EdTech examples & tools to try. Choose from a list of sites and apps including AI tools, gamification sites, eMediaVA, and more! Take your lessons to the next level this school year with interactive [and free] EdTech tools.

This session will provide participants with information about how to leverage Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) to help improve learners' efficiency, personalize their learning experiences, and streamline your administrative processes. This will ultimately lead to better educational outcomes for students. We will focus on MagicSchoolAI and SchoolAI as the GenAI platforms.

Join us for a session where we will delve into the integration of technology in local elementary schools. This research-driven presentation focuses on identifying the technological resources currently utilized by teachers and assessing their effectiveness through the lens of the Triple-E Framework: Engagement, Enhancement, and Extension. We will present findings from a comprehensive study that explores how various digital tools and resources are being employed to support instructional practices. We will analyze their impact on student engagement, the enhancement of learning goals, and the extension of learning beyond the classroom.

Navigate the transformative waters of educational coaching with the VSTE Certified Coach (VCC) Program. This session provides an overview of the program, including a deep dive into the portfolio and artifacts essential for certification. Discover the substantial benefits of becoming a VCC and how it can elevate your educational impact. We'll also explore the program's future and evolving opportunities for professional growth. Join us to chart a course toward transformative coaching practices that inspire educators and drive student success.

In this age of teacher shortages, administrators, leads, and coaches must find ways to retain new teachers in our schools and districts. We are sharing our intentional, differentiated approach to coaching new teachers with a wide array of experience and knowledge.

In today?s educational landscape, ensuring accessibility is not just a requirement but a fundamental aspect of creating inclusive learning environments. This session will focus on the principles and practices of designing accessible course content using your LMS, with a special emphasis on leveraging HTML code for advanced customization. Don?t be intimidated by HTML - you will learn the basics you need to know! Participants will learn through hands-on experiences to create beautiful and organized pages. Join in to sail towards innovation and accessibility, ensuring every student can navigate their educational journey successfully.; In today?s educational landscape, ensuring accessibility is not just a requirement but a fundamental aspect of creating inclusive learning environments. This session will focus on the principles and practices of designing accessible course content using your LMS, with a special emphasis on leveraging HTML code for advanced customization. Don?t be intimidated by HTML - you will learn the basics you need to know! Participants will learn through hands-on experiences to create beautiful and organized pages. Join in to sail towards innovation and accessibility, ensuring every student can navigate their educational journey successfully.; In today?s educational landscape, ensuring accessibility is not just a requirement but a fundamental aspect of creating inclusive learning environments. This session will focus on the principles and practices of designing accessible course content using your LMS, with a special emphasis on leveraging HTML code for advanced customization. Don?t be intimidated by HTML - you will learn the basics you need to know! Participants will learn through hands-on experiences to create beautiful and organized pages. Join in to sail towards innovation and accessibility, ensuring every student can navigate their educational journey successfully.; In today?s educational landscape, ensuring accessibility is not just a requirement but a fundamental aspect of creating inclusive learning environments. This session will focus on the principles and practices of designing accessible course content using your LMS, with a special emphasis on leveraging HTML code for advanced customization. Don?t be intimidated by HTML - you will learn the basics you need to know! Participants will learn through hands-on experiences to create beautiful and organized pages. Join in to sail towards innovation and accessibility, ensuring every student can navigate their educational journey successfully.

Anchor your professional development in a solid and consistent framework! By establishing a clear theme, you create a robust structure for a yearlong PD plan that integrates effective instructional strategies for your teachers. This approach fosters a shared culture of consistent terminology, strategies, and support, ensuring that your professional learning remains relevant and impactful throughout the year. Intended for instructional technology coaches and administrators.

Join us for an engaging and insightful session where we reveal the secrets to transforming your classroom from chaos to calm. Discover time-tested, research-based strategies and techniques that have been proven to enhance student focus, drastically reduce problem behavior, and increase valuable instruction time (that you can use on Monday). In this jam-packed session, you will learn how to: ? Improve student focus ? Drastically reduce problem behavior ? Increase instruction time

Insert your quarter, grab a Tab, and press start for this session on how coding text-based adventure games like Zork can get your students creating, writing, and reading. In this session we will crowd source our own VSTE Adventure game so that you'll see the step-by-step process on how to EASILY write a playable text based adventure game. You'll get the writing template, coding template, and lesson plan/procedure/timeline to make this a ready to go lesson that you can do today! You and your students will love writing their own games and playing each other's games in their own classroom arcade. Although this session will be concentrating on writing and reading, we will talk about ideas on how to get this into history, science, math and beyond.

You have done the work. Did it work? Did your plan yield results? If you are a person that enjoys data or thinks that Spreadsheets are the best tool ever, then this session is for you! I will provide data you can use, but please come with data also.

How to use AI to help support and assist with your classroom duties. Using AI programs like BriskAI, Curipod, Quizizz, and Question Well to help make review material and resources for your classroom.

This session designed specifically for new instructional technology resource teachers and coaches who are new to instructional coaching. This session provides an overview to the skills and strategies needed to excel in this position. Participants will explore effective ways to build relationships with teachers, administrators, and other stakeholders in order to promote meaningful integration of technology in instruction. The session will also delve into best practices for conducting technology-focused professional development workshops and facilitating one-on-one coaching sessions. Throughout the session, new ITRTs will gain practical tips and tricks for managing their time, resources, and projects to ensure their success as instructional coaches in their respective educational settings.

Many programming environments only offer English as an option for coding. What if you could design your own custom blocks for Makecode in a language that meets your students' needs and have them setup with their device in their target language? In this session we share resources on developing custom multilingual coding environments and operationalizing them in a dual language immersion program. We will share strategies and templates to develop your own blocks in Makecode and quickly set them up to use in the classroom, natively. We will share the process and what has worked and what hasn't!

Co-Presenting with Eric Bredder is Robyn DiCarlo.

Unlock the potential of Canvas Studio. Learn how to diversify student learning and engagement using this powerful resource. Anchor student success with Canvas Studio. Join our innovative Studio session.

In this interactive and collaborative session, you?ll dive into the exciting world of student self-animation using digital tools. Discover how to empower learners of all ages to express themselves through animation, characters, and creativity. We?ll explore user-friendly platforms, share practical tips, and reflect on integrating self-animation into your curriculum. Participants will leave with practical ideas, resources, and newfound confidence to nurture creativity in their students. Don?t miss this opportunity to ignite imagination, foster collaboration, and inspire your students with captivating animations!

Participants will experience a strategy called ?Become a Youtuber? in which students, in a blended learning format, teach their ?subscribers? a topic. Attendees will observe 3rd graders using the strategy and have time to plan, prepare, and practice.

This session will discuss findings from the second year of the VDOE funded, CS4MS project. The project provides computer science Professional Development opportunities for Region II teachers instructing students in middle school grades 6- 8. Participating teachers learn to integrate CS standards into core and elective content through online, asynchronous microcredentials and an in-person Summer Workshop. Project findings and next steps will be included in the presentation.

In today's digital age, teaching digital citizenship is essential for students to navigate the online world responsibly and safely. This proposal outlines a comprehensive, engaging, and practical approach to teaching K-5 students digital citizenship through real-world scenarios. The session will focus on fostering positive online behavior, understanding digital footprints, maintaining authenticity, balancing screen time, and protecting privacy. We will equip educators (coaches, admin, ITS) with practical strategies to teach digital citizenship. The proposed activities and lessons enable students to reflect on their online actions and their consequences. Our goal is to cultivate a positive online presence for young students, ensuring that their digital footprints remain positive as they continue their journey in life.

Did you know Desmos is a FREE resource that offers more than just a calculator? Discover how Desmos can transform your teaching with interactive asessments! In this session, I will show you how to create self-checking assessments using Desmos' powerful features. Plus, you will receive a reflective tool to help students identify areas where they need more support while using Desmos.

In this globally connected world, are board games a thing of the past? I think not. Getting together with friends or family for "Game Night" still has an appeal for most people. Within the walls of our classrooms, the most engaging activities consist of student choice, innovation and a little competition. There's never been a better time to dive into bringing gamified learning to your class and, in my opinion, Genially templates hold the key to this endeavor. Participants will use Genially Templates to create digital board games to play as a whole group, with teams, or as a station. The games may be coordinated with any content and any standard. Participants should have a content area and standard in mind for their design. By the end of this make and take session, participants will have a completed game ready to play next year.

With the push to implement the Computer Science SOL standards into our classrooms in recent years, this session will give you some ideas for library activities that incorporate various Computer Science standards covering multiple grade levels. For each library activity, we will explain the CS standards being covered in the lesson. If you ever need to document how you are covering the CS standards in your library class, this session is for you.

Who is truly using the technology in your classrooms the teachers or the students? Is a worksheet on Canvas or Schoology more effective than one on paper? Are teachers getting the most out of the interactive board at the front of their classrooms? The PIC-RAT model for Technology Integration provides educators with a framework to assess the impact of technology on student learning. This model not only evaluates whether new tools are transforming instructional practices but also examines whether students are interacting with the technology in active or passive ways. In this interactive session, you will practice using the matrix and discuss how the tool can be used for self-reflection or coaching teachers to improve their practice.

KidWind has a saying, ?Dream big, but start small.? Join a KidWind coach as she explains how KidWind.org coaches work with students to creatively explore the science, technology, and implications of a world powered by clean energy. Many schools now have STEM (STEAM) classes, or, environmental education courses during the school day, or after-school clubs that address environmental literacy topics. KidWind plays a big part in after-school and in-school lessons promoting clean energy education in Virginia. As the world is increasingly powered by clean energy, it is more critical than ever that we help prepare a workforce that understands the complexities of this new power generation.

Collaborative learning technologies have the potential to transform traditional educational practices by fostering a more interactive and engaging learning environment. This presentation will explore the impact of collaborative tools such as online discussion forums, collaborative documents, and social media platforms on student engagement and learning outcomes. Through a combination of theoretical insights and practical examples, participants will gain a comprehensive understanding of how to effectively integrate these technologies into their teaching practices to enhance student collaboration and achievement.

Executive skills develop until age 25, with rapid growth in the middle years. We must be cautious and intentional in saying, "They already know how to do this!" Using the UDL guidelines, we explore how to scaffold Strategic, Goal-Directed, Purposeful, and Motivated Learners. We provide classroom-level and schoolwide evidence-based strategies for teachers, coaches, and administrators to put in place to develop students? executive skills -- and scaffold the ones that won?t develop until age 25! Understand the range of executive skills Understand critical characteristics of executive skills Identify opportunities to scaffold and build executive skills during the middle school day Identify activities and strategies to scaffold and build executive skills during the middle school day Participants will have a QR code for access to materials, explore a handout and examples, and discuss with the presenters to personalize to their own setting and network for the future.

Anchoring a vision of innovation in the fundamental understanding of how technology supports content and pedagogy can lead to powerful change in the classroom. In this interactive session, we will consider what innovation looks like, learn about and practice using the Technological Pedagogical Content model for lesson planning and explore opportunities to use TPACK as an anchor for more student-centered, engaging instruction. Come prepared to play as we explore and create new ways of approaching instructional design.

Do you like having some time added back into your day? Would you like to have high quality materials ready for your students with little to no work on your side? Then this session is for you! Throughout the session, templates will be shared for a variety of Google apps, Canva, Adobe Express, AI Prompts, and whole lesson plans that can be applied to and used in any subject area. Further resources and websites will be shared to continue the learning well after the session ends.

In today's digital age, proficiency in computer science (CS) is no longer confined to IT departments but has become essential across all disciplines. We advocate for the integration of CS principles and practices into every subject area of the curriculum. By embedding computational thinking into all core subjects, educators can foster critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity in students, preparing them for the ever changing digital world. We are looking forward to exploring the newly adopted computer science standards.

Come hear about one team?s journey to developing self-paced learning units in an upper elementary classroom. Explore various strategies for increasing independent learning, balancing teacher intervention, and incorporating student choice.  This session will be a very honest exploration of the challenges and success that we have encountered while developing self-paced learning units in an upper elementary classroom. We will share the necessary components of a self-paced learning unit, various strategies for how students work through the unit, ways to incorporate teacher instruction/intervention, and tips on how to organize the classroom during self-paced learning. Presenters will share templates and other resources while guiding presenters through the process of planning a self-paced learning unit.

When most of us think of an anchor, a particular shape comes to mind. In truth, anchors come in many different shapes and sizes depending on their purpose. Just like in teaching, a one-size-fits-all approach just won't work for every situation. In this interactive session, you will experience how technology and Universal Design for Learning can go hand in hand to meet the needs of all learners in the elementary classroom. We will dive into the UDL Core Beliefs and Design Process, exploring the technology tools that can support out students' learning. Please bring a charged tablet or laptop in order to participate fully in this session!