Vermont Fest 2014

School safety, it’s something that can never be taken lightly. What if you could change the way educators and students respond to threatening or suspicious events? ELERTS Lock It Down is one of the most effective and robust public safety communication platforms using smartphones. Using mobile technology to combine official-sourced alerts with crowd-sourced reports, ELERTS is putting safety and security in the hands of smartphone users in schools across the nation. Join WCA and ELERTS to learn how to make your school a safer place today.

Attend this session to hear how two teachers, from different schools in Vermont connected here at Vermont Fest and how their early elementary students became mentors and models using Kidblog and Twitter as a platform to connect and engage in fun and meaningful learning activities!

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Come explore Bookshare.org to make books, newpapers and other print materials accessible for students Grade 3 and older. This is a free national program available for students who qualify for an IEP or 504 Plan, who have a print disabiity due to physical, learning or visual challenges. Learn how to use Bookshare.org on an IPad or PC computer. This AT tool can open up the world of print for your students with the most challenging reading difficulties.

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Chrome Supports for Struggling Readers and Writers
While the Google Apps for Education environment provides great tools for productivity and collaboration, they still lack some of the supports needed by struggling readers and writers. Attendees will see demonstrations of these supports in Read&Write for Google™, which includes a Chrome Extension that works on PCs, Macs, and Chromebooks to make Google Documents more accessible, a toolbar for reading in the Chrome browser, and Apps to make PDF and ePub accessible within Google Drive.

What are the advantages and challenges of “paperless classrooms?” How can Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Schoology increase efficiency, improve communication between teachers, students and parents and allow teachers to personalize learning? Mount Mansfield is in it’s second year of school-wide LMS implementation and we continue to learn and grow. Come hear our experience and learn some of the strategies we have developed along the way.

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Many schools are now using the Lucy Calkins writing workshop materials in grades K-5. Have you noticed that they do not include mention of technology? Most teachers using these materials are building units of study to implement this great resource, but how can we better integrate technology in an authentic manner that not only supports the writing workshop model, but also impacts building student technology skills? These authentic writing experiences utilizing technology will also help prepare our students for the SBAC.

In this workshop, participants will hear about and see examples of how teachers in CSSU and Vermont are striving to integrate technology into this program and other literacy areas. Together, we’ll build a collaborative resource to share and use with our collective ideas. This work also directly corresponds to many Common Core standards that address writing and technology.

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This hands on style of video production can be done with a wide range of grade levels with minimal equipment. It’s conducive to small group work with unique roles and can also be used for any content area and supports CCSS, as well as serving as an assessment tool. The greatest benefit is that students will be doing the majority of the work.

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