Presenting at LACUE 2013




I am not going to bore you with the stress that I have had over the last three weeks. Just suffice it to say that life can hit you with some very difficult curve balls. What makes it nice is to have a collaborator who watches your back. In September when I decided to present at the annual conference for the Louisiana Association of Computer Using Educators (LACUE), I had no clue that time would get away from me. Kelly Maher and I have presented together before, and we planned to do it again this year. I like working with Kelly because we are very different and each of us are able to make unique contributions to our presentations. So I am writing this and offering a HUGE shout out to Kelly for probably pulling way more weight on this presentation than I did. I really appreciate it because I think that we nailed it. 

This time around we wanted to inspire, share some of what we have done by telling stories and introduce some new web tools. We wanted to emphasize that most of the projects assigned can be accomplished across platforms. Patrick Taylor Academy is a 1:1 laptop school, but many of the programs that we use are also available on phones and tablets and different operating systems. We see the writing on the wall and don't believe that schools will be able to afford to continue purchasing electronics for the students. We think that bring your own device (BYOD) is going to be the next big thing in education and ed tech. If we set up our projects and assignments to make it easier for students to complete on a myriad of devices, then we are providing students both choice and a way to accomplish tasks more efficiently for the individual student. 

Kelly and I are Armed and Ready

We titled our presentation: "Be Armed and Ready for the Next Evolution in Educational Technology." You can find all of our resources on the wiki that we created here: http://nextevolutioninedtech.wikispaces.com/. Check out our links, you will probably find something that you haven't used before. Hopefully, I will have an opportunity soon to look at all the new tools that I encountered during this conference, and when I do, I will share with you on this blog.

As part of our presentation, we showed a short film of two students from Patrick Taylor Academy talking about the importance of technology in their lives. You can view the video below. Please note the problem solving that Paris had to do to overcome the lack of Internet access at home. You


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