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Learning Together at MACUL: Anybody can Technology!

Our next MACUL experience comes to you from our guest blogger, Malena Schrauben.  Malena is a science/computer science teacher at CMS and inspires me daily with her enthusiasm and drive.  A week ago, she presented at the Mobile Learning Conference at KRESA about how she uses Scratch in her classroom.  However, it wasn't just her up in front of the audience.  She brought along several of her CMS students to share in the experience and show the audience the amazing projects they have been creating to demonstrate their learning in her class.  I couldn't have been more proud of the students, or their teacher!

Learning from my colleagues and teachers is one of my favorite parts of my job.  I am so lucky to work with these amazing Rock Star teachers.  Here is what Malena wished to share with all of us about her MACUL experience.
I loved attending MACUL! I would say my biggest takeaway was the amount of collaboration that took place among strangers. But we weren't strangers, we are teachers and that brought us together. Everyone was there to grow as an educator and it was amazing! We are all looking for ways to incorporate technology into our classroom and engage our students. We are all at different levels with our implementation and comfort. I hope all teachers take the opportunity to attend. Even if you come away with one AH HA! that is awesome! Two tools that I thought were great were wheeldecide.com and tagboard.com. Wheeldecide is a site you can visit and put categories onto a spilling wheel. It can be used to put students into groups or decide on topics for summative/formative assessments. I see myself using it to assign stations or activities in my class. I also loved tagboard, tagboard is a site you can visit to search hashtags. No matter what social media you are using you can pull up a hashtag. I use #doworkcms with my students. I also have both instagram and twitter accounts that I use for education and I can pull up work students have hashtagged or tweets/posts. MACUL also helped build my confidence level. We are all trying to be better, blend better, technology better. What better way than to do it together! :) 

Thank you so much, Malena, for sharing your experience!  We look forward to seeing the awesome ways you continue to use technology in your classroom.


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