Last weekend I had the pleasure attending Playdate Boston, the latest iteration of educators redefining professional development to make it more useful for thm. The premise of a Playdate is that in most professional development sessions you hear about all these new fantastic tools, but don’t get the time to actually play with them and figure out how they will (or won’t) fit into you professional life. Playdate was a time to bring educators together to do just that.

Each playdate session had (loosely) four parts:

1. A quick intro the the topic of the session.
2. A quick discussion about what a teacher could do with the tool. How to use it with kids, roadblocks, etc.
3. Time to play!
4. A quick debrief.

The day ended with a Slam where participants shared what they’d learned, allowing us to hear about the sessions we didn’t attend. Collaborative notes from the Slam are here.

A few days out, this is what has stuck in my mind (in no particular order):

• Playdates are fun. Educators need more of these.
• Explain Everything. I need to spend more time with this app – and by that I mean my students need to spend more time with it. The last couple updates have made the app explode. Embedded browsers, that are live during recording blew me away. It really is such a versatile tool for allowing students to show their learning.
• Bump is a much better way for my students to get content from one iPad to another. In the past we’ve used a shared classroom Dropbox account. Bump will do this more easily.
• Workflow idea. Every Evernote account has a dedicated email address so you can email directly into the account (or to a specific notebook!). Put that email address in the contacts of student iPads so they can email their work directly to a teacher’s Evernote account.
• iMovie (for the iPad). I (and my students) also need to spend more time with this app. It’s one-stop shopping for movies (shooting, selecting clips, editing, publishing, sharing). Learned about one downside of the app allowing you to not save the unwanted clips – no material for a bloopers reel.
• Discovery Education has clips in its library that are okay to reuse in student projects.
• Symbaloo. This is cool, a visual way of curating links. I use a “Student Links” page on my classroom website, but I like the visual tile look of Symbaloo.
• Image Dictionary is a Chrome extension that allows users to look up a word, but instead of getting a dictionary definition (which is often not terribly useful for a struggling reader) it produces a picture. Great for younger readers.

And to cap off the day, it was the opening night of Boston Roller Derby!

top photo credit: Express Monorail via photopin cc