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Writer's pictureAdam Sparks

5 Takeaways From NETA 2018



NETA was awesome...again. Here were 5 of my many takeaways:


1. Talking to people is half the joy of NETA

Don’t get me wrong, most of the presentations I went to were killer (especially the keynote by Joe Sanfelippo and the breakouts by Leslie Fischer) and I learned a lot from them. That said, some of my most valuable time spent at NETA was just talking with other educators. Both of the years that I attended NETA, I’ve found it very reenergizing (I’ve noticed a lot of friends saying the same thing). I think part of that rejuvenation comes from the resources presented at the conference, some it comes from simply not having to go to school for a couple of days, but the biggest part comes from getting to sit around and talk shop with people that are just as passionate about education as I am. I got to talk to a fellow social studies teacher who came up with a better way to do an activity in my class using Google Slides instead of Google Docs. I got to talk to a tech coordinator who gave me some ideas on graduate school. I got to talk to my former 5th grade teacher, who is doing this insanely awesome project with a New York Times bestselling author. Those interactions were some of my most memorable and valuable.


2. The best tech tools were….

Alright, there were a lot, but the three I am most interested in moving forward are:

- Insert Learning. It lets you add teacher voice / video / comments / student discussions where they can post things / etc to any webpage. The options here seem limitless.

- Classroom Screen. It is a collection of all sorts of cool tools, including a microphone that students can’t get above a certain volume with when working. It is made to pull up in your classroom during work time, which we have a lot of for creative projects, so I could see myself using this alot.

- PDF Candy - All sorts of awesome tools to pull information out of PDFs. It’s so simple, I have always hated the weird struggle of trying to pull information from PDFs to use in class. This will be a life saver.


3.Teachers don’t need more tech tools, they need to be sold on the ones they have

This one is kind of specific to my presentation, but it was a big insight for me. My presentation was on Google Docs, Forms, Flipgrid, Socrative, and Quizlet. Those are all tools that people with even a rudimentary knowledge of educational tech are familiar with, so I was nervous that it would flop, That said, I ended up with great feedback on my presentation. A lot of that feedback appreciated the deep dive into each tech tool that explained, specifically, how to use it in the classroom. That was a lesson for me as I continue to consider some sort of edtech masters degree: Teachers don’t necessarily need more tools, they need to be sold on tools. So don’t just have a professional development day where you throw out 15 tech tools and explain what each does in the hopes that people can use them. Share out 5 tech tools, but a variety of very specific activities that each can be used for based on experiences from the classroom.


4. I don’t buy Apple in the Edtech software realm

Apple hardware is the best, no doubt, especially all the awesome opportunities that an Ipad makes possible. Yes, the price is much higher, but you get a long lasting and high quality product with enough RAM and processing speed to run almost any edtech software. That said, hardware is only half the equation. When it comes to software and web services…... what does Apple offer that is better than Google? List one reason Keynote and Pages are better than Google Docs / Slides. Does Apple offer anything near as powerful as Google Forms? How about cloud storage? (Sorry, your ICloud is full) How about price point? The Thursday keynote was sort of emblematic of the entire Apple edtech approach. It really seems to be more “buy our Ipads in bulk!” than “we make tools because we care about changing education” (I mean, we watched an Ipad commercial). When you look at the tools Google is building, how open they are about working well with other platforms, their teacher training and innovation programs, their cloud storage space, their Chrome ecosystem and ever expanding library of open source extensions….I don’t see a comparison at all. The only non hardware tech that Apple shared at NETA that was exciting was Clips….which I can’t use on my Chromebooks or any non Apple OS device. Unless you’re going all in in every aspect (which is what Apple wants), Apple just doesn’t make sense to me in edtech (except for Ipads)


5. Technology is changing the relationship between schools & their communities.

Joe Sanfelippo's keynote was one of the best public speeches I’ve seen in person. I could list 15 different moments in the keynote that stood out, but the clip where the girl gets her first job and they have it on tape to send to mom, and all the kids are lined up to meet her, is what stands out most. Just totally empathetic and selfless, emblematic of the whole presentation. That guy (and his district) totally oozed everything that education, too often, is not. He was enthusiastic, innovative, original, inspiring. The amount of thought and care that went into all the community building activities they do is impressive, but the really impressive part was that it all came off as so selfless and empathetic. Going in, I was sort of expecting a silly “how-to make your school seem great on social media” presentation. In the same way that people try to carve out a new identity online by curating the photos they choose to share with the world to make themselves seem better looking, more popular, more worldly, more adventurous, etc, so too do school districts pick and choose photos and stories to share as a school district on Twitter that distort reality. I can post a picture on Twitter of my kids doing a digital breakout with #milfordsoar behind it and make my classroom look like I am absolutely killing it, when in reality, that breakout might have been a total disaster that didn’t teach my kids anything (as it was with my Greece breakout earlier this year!). In that way, school use of social media to communicate with the larger district can sometimes seem hollow. Sanfelippo was everything but hollow, so he sort of flipped my expectations upside down. The lesson seemed to be that school culture, and community buy in, are about empathy. Social media is powerful in its ability to enhance that empathy by allowing communities to not just look at, but to actively be a part of, the school. It has me brainstorming different ways that I could more effectively use my community with the activities in my classroom (by possibly advertising the finals of our debate project around town and streaming it live on Twitter....we shall see....)


NOTE: This was originally written in 2018 while working as a 7th-8th grade social studies teacher with Milford Public Schools in Nebraska.


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