Introduction
As part of my continuous learning, I attended the Create! Conference 2024 held in Maumee, Ohio. It only appeared on my radar a few weeks ago, and though I attempted to recruit some coworkers to attend with me, I ended up going solo, which is standard operating procedure for me at any rate. The tagline for the conference was “Creativity. Technology. Instruction.” The tagline alone was enough to get me jazzed for the learning opportunity, as 21st century skills and learning through play, inquiry, and projects has been at the forefront of my mind. The conference “was conceived to provide educators with an opportunity to explore and discover real-world, standards-based lessons that incorporate creativity, technology and 21st century skills. Lessons containing these characteristics result in engaging, inspiring, student-centered learning.”
Although the conference was a 2 hour drive from my house, it was worth the 4 hour round trip and modest conference fee of $30, which included breakfast and lunch. While eating breakfast, I noticed another attendee at my table using a 100e Chromebook and I asked “how is that Chromebook working out for you?” I didn’t expect my question to garner much response, I was simply genuinely curious as the day prior I had obsoleted and deprovisioned several 100e Chromebooks from our school inventory as they were at EoL. To my surprise, this question sparked up a conversation, leading me to subsequently helping this attendee login to the WiFi and get situated for the day. I found out she is a 3rd grade teacher at another local public school in the Toledo area, but when she found out I worked at a Christian school we connected and exchanged proper introductions as she attended a Christian school from 8th through 12th grade. It was rejuvenating to connect and interact with someone at a conference throughout the day and making a new connection was one of the highlights of my conference attendance, an aspect that is usually missing from my experience at these events.
Teams for Integrated Learning Experiences (TILEs) led by Dr. Allison Goedde
The first session I attended was entitled “Teams for Integrated Learning Experiences (TILEs), led by Dr. Allison Goedde from Bowling Green State University. TILEs is what Goedde terms the culmination, self-directed group work that student educators undertake in her instructional design course. Students formed teams themselves to create portfolios of content within the platform ThingLink. ThingLink merges a wide variety of media from 2-D stills, 360 video, and text mapped to hotspot points to create an interactive learning virtual environment. It struck me as similar to WikiPedia, except instead of having all the content displayed in one long article form, you could create a 3-D space that learners can click on to read the information. Placing content in this medium speaks to a wider array of learners than the traditional PowerPoint or article formats. What most excited me about this type of work was not the technology used (I actually skipped the 2nd session that taught how to use ThingLink), but the methodology involved. Dr. Goedde directed the vision and mission of the project, but did not have any guidelines for style or method, instead opting to let the students figure it out themselves as a form of empowering them to think and learn for themselves! Placing the majority of the decisions and choices into the hands of the learners, and putting them in teams to complete the work, places ownership over learning into the hands of the students, all while learning new technology skills and digital literacy, collaboration and communication with others, in a self-directed format. These are ideas I had read about, but seeing them implemented in action was exciting! The students even selected their own topics and how exactly they would utilize ThingLink. No two projects were alike at all, and working in teams each group of students found innovative ways to push the boundaries of what the technology can do,even breaking it at times. While this was implemented for college students passionate about education, I am curious to adapt the process for younger students, as a path for more self-directed learning.
Empower & Engage led by Stephanie Howell
My next session was “Empower & Engage: Feedback with Kami” by Stephanie Howell. I was excited to attend this session because Stephanie is in my LinkedIn network, even though it ended up being a virtual session and I did not have the opportunity to meet her in person. I was also eager to learn how to give more effective feedback, as I feel pulled towards more of a teacher role. Stephanie used the topic of giving feedback as the content source for teaching the session participants a crash course on Kami, which is a brilliant instructional technique. Rather than simply guiding us through the tools within Kami, she had an interactive presentation outlined so we were learning about giving feedback at the same time as learning a new tech tool. I’d heard of Kami before, but had not used it much prior. Kami is an app that provides a way for teachers and students to interact more robustly in a presentation or document. Teachers can lock down how much access students have to use various features. The highlights of Kami for me are the ability to respond with stickers, images, audio, video, and even a screen recording. My mind is spinning with the possibilities available with Kami for giving more interactive feedback. But to the theory behind empowering students with rich feedback, Stephanie pointed us to John Hattie. Feedback should use criteria, not judgment. In order for feedback to be helpful, it should suggest next steps for improvement and be timely. It doesn’t help students to receive feedback weeks after a learning experience. Stephanie also provided the group with sentence structure stems, topics, and adjectives that could be used to compose more compelling feedback. Since Stephanie comes from a background in instructional coaching, I asked her a question on how to give feedback to teachers rather than to students and she pointed me to the work of Jim Knight (already read The Instructional Playbook) and Elena Aguilar’sThe PD Book (which is now on the ever expanding book reading list). Gaining additional steps for self-directed learning from a PD session is optimal for me and what I look for from a presenter.
UDL & AI led by Heidi Orvash
The pre-lunch session I attended was on UDL & AI led by Heidi Orvash. Truthfully I only wanted to learn more about UDL and how AI may augment it, but I arrived late and by the time I entered the session the brief discussion on UDL was already wrapping up. And I’m embarrassed to say this, but I thought UDL stood for ‘user-designed learning,’ while it actually stands for ‘universal design for learning.’ Heidi outlined what the UDL framework is: engagement, representation, and action & expression. Unfortunately I still do not have a clear understanding of what UDL is and how it applies to learning. The rest of the session was framed around a series of AI tools designed for educators: Padlet Fusion, CuriPod, Parlay, Ludia, and MagicSchool AI. I won’t go into detail on these apps, as I don’t think it is worth my time as none of them really impressed me. My impression of AI tools for educators centers on them generating lesson plans and class materials in the span of a minute, instead of the teacher needing to spend hours creating these same materials. Cool, I guess? This isn’t AI transforming teaching or learning, it is simply leaning on AI to move classroom content creation away from the teacher. My big question with AI in education is, we need to be teaching people how to think, so why are we removing thinking from the teaching preparation process? The teachers should be constructing the content themselves as part of the teaching prep process, because when you create it yourself you know it that much better and can review whether or not an aspect actually belongs in the lesson. Further, my vision for education is a classroom more oriented around students constructing the content themselves, because when students construct knowledge for themselves it goes into deep memory and is much easier for them to apply than surface level learning. Using AI to circumvent the critical knowledge generation process does not appeal to me as a meaningful way to empower and lead students effectively. And this is where I believe AI educational tools are falling short. They don’t change the way students learn (at least not the ones discussed at conferences). They simply facilitate and reduce the burden on teachers to continue teaching the same way students have been taught the last 50 years. Yawn. Wake me up when September comes.
Keynote: How Chagrin Falls Schools Embraced AI led by Mike Daugherty & Molly Klodor
Following lunch was a keynote presentation on “How Chagrin Falls Schools Embraced AI,” led by Mike Daugherty and Molly Klodor. The session focused on the conversations and steps taken at Chagrin Falls when ChatGPT debuted late in 2022 and overall lessons learned towards implementing AI use within a school district. One of the first steps was to acquire teacher buy-in on the direction the school was going in. To accomplish this, Mike and Molly held a PD session for teachers on what AI is, played games with AI, and were able to pique the interest of teachers. Then they showed the power of AI, talked about policy, guidelines for student use, and encouraged all the students and teachers to use AI in the school. They also held a session again right before the school year to reiterate policy and clear up questions. The main component that is critical for widespread adoption is an overall mindset shift. This shift needs to occur coterminously at the administrative level as it is at the faculty and student level. The main universal truth is that admins need to use it if they expect their staff to use it. Admins should play with it, figure out how and in what situations it works, and when and where it doesn’t work. Students will figure out ways to manipulate and push the boundaries, so admins need to keep at it as well to understand the nuance at stake. Leadership within the district need to create a safe space for staff to learn and make mistakes in it with the key phrase being “try and succeed more often than you fail.” As a district rolls out policies on AI, continued instruction on appropriate use is needed with teachers and students, such as what the inherent biases are, how to be discerning in what ChatGPT responds with, and how learning processes should shift to not being able to be completed by ChatGPT to keep the educational integrity intact. As my mind functions by policy and procedure, it was beneficial to see what elements need to be in place for AI to function well within a district. But I would have liked to hear more about how learning outcomes shifted because of AI use. How did the learning process itself change? How are students and families benefiting from it? The learning theory and methodology is a core component of every discussion behind technology implementation but it often appears to fall by the wayside, or happen behind closed doors. When I’m at a conference I want those doors thrown wide open, so that we can all learn how to implement technology more effectively.
Autocrat led by Emily Ery
For the first of the afternoon sessions I chose one on automating PDFs using a tool called Autocrat, led by Emily Ery. To be honest, I was not that excited to attend, but the other sessions weren’t that interesting either for this timeslot and so my new friend and I decided to attend this together. Autocrat is a Google Workspace add-on to Google Sheets that essentially lets you use the mail merge function between the Google Workspace apps. Being familiar with mail merge fields from my days in non-profit membership and development (sending out thousands of letters a year) I only needed the broad overview as I’m very comfortable with merge fields themselves in practice. But as Emily led us through the session, I started to become more excited about this tool. The interesting features of the tool are that it can generate PDFs from data in a Google Sheet, and even email it. It struck me that several of our office and support staff at the school may find this tool very effective in streamlining processes and reducing manual entry by automating certain data functions. It is definitely a tool that I want to play around with more and teach staff on how to use. The day after the conference I already spoke with two staff members about the potential for the tool and how they might apply it within their everyday job functions.
Cross-Curricular Lessons: Student Choice, Technology, and Differentiation led by Caylin Morstadt, Tricia Yoho & Taylor Pawliski
The last session I attended ended up being one of my favorites, even though it was attended by only one other person with me (Emily, who led the prior session I attended). The session was “Cross-Curricular Lessons: Student Choice, Technology, and Differentiation,” led by Caylin Morstadt, Tricia Yoho, and Taylor Pawliski. This was one of the sessions that caught my eye a few weeks before and motivated me to attend the conference. These 5th grade teachers took an ELA unit and a Social Studies unit and created a joint project that was formed around standards from both content areas. The specific standards and content isn’t actually important to detail here, as the methodology can be applied to any standards that are text based across disciplines. Students were paired up between the two homerooms participating, which promotes the skills of collaboration and communication. Teachers prepared an outline of what assignments needed to be completed to help guide students through the process of their final project. The required materials were a graphic organizer, essay template, and student essay checklist. Then students were required to create their own flipboard, a sort of handmade notebook filled with handwritten notes determined by the students themselves, which embodies student created learning and knowledge systems! The students would use their flipbooks to complete the rest of the assignment, because all the content they needed would be within their own flipboard. The flipboard served as an ideaboard, a way for students to write out key information, and the categories matched the graphic organizer. Each student was required to complete an ELA component and a Social Studies component of the lesson module. The ELA component was an essay, while the Social Studies one was a choice of two artifacts of learning from a Choiceboard of six options. The Social Studies component was where students would work in pairs together to create their artifacts of learning. The Choice Board included options such as Museum Artifact, Blooket, Movie Poster, Google Slides, Board Game, or Escape Room (created in Google Forms). Each selection required a different set of technology and application skills, requiring students to work independently and think creatively. This element of the module is where differentiation came into play more fully, as students had choice and agency in what they wanted to create, rather than being forced into a singular medium that may not enable them to demonstrate their learning as fully. I was very excited about all that these teachers were doing as this is the type of coordination and interdisciplinary work that should be done in schools. I recently started a course on STEAM and I was struck that these teachers were using that methodology without realizing it. They looked at their respective standards, saw where the standards aligned, and created a joint project together. Now imagine if each module your classroom collaborated with a different subject area to meld knowledge systems together? Students would be able to think more creatively, more critically, and apply knowledge in new ways because of these types of projects. It saddened me that only two of us chose to view this session, while the one on UDL and AI had over 20 people present, as to me cross-curricular learning is everything that’s right about education.
Conclusion
In summary, the Create! Conference 2024 was a great experience that exposed me to new ideas and ways to implement technology and 21st skills within education. I am looking forward to attending in the future, even though it may change its format next year. One element that I noticed was in session length and depth of content. Presenters either had more than 50 minutes worth of content and talked fast to cram it all in, while others only had 15 minutes worth of content that they tried to stretch to fill a full session (at least in the sessions I attended). Some sessions would have been better served with a longer slot, while others could function fine with a shorter one. I know it creates a sort of logistical nightmare, but a conference with time slots that are longer and more in-depth and one with short, micro bite-sized PD would be valuable as well. Thank you to all involved in organizing and putting together this learning opportunity!