ICE Conference 2016: Kristin Bartholomew

During the last week of February, thirteen teachers from York were able to attend the ICE Conference.  The ICE Conference is an annual gathering for educators from across the state who want to share and learn more about how technology and innovative teaching can be used to help their students learn.  Throughout this week, teachers who attended the conference will be sharing a bit of what they learned at the conference.  

In this post, we'll be hearing from Kristin Bartholomew, the pioneering TSI teacher who keeps our students' Chromebooks working smoothly:

"I tend to end up with a single focus when I attend these types of conferences, and since my TSI students are responding so much to class awards and having things on the wall below their photos, I focused on the big surge in gamification in the classroom.

First of all, there is a LOT of front loading that goes on before getting a great system going in the classroom. I thought about doing some sort of March Madness, but with mini awards going to students with self-made badges on the wall for various things (3 screens repaired in a period, fixing a CB without doing anything "magic touch", etc.) Since it is already March and I'm not ready to do this, I'm thinking we can kick it off as just the last 2 weeks. I've already started making badges.

                      

The best session, which was more of a challenge and I'd still have to see how to use it, was the BreakoutEdu session. A box sat on the table with 5 locks on it and riddles and puzzles had to be solved to get them open in a 30 minute time frame (My group did it in 31). The puzzles were a mix of paper clues (like translating hieroglyphics) to clues with YouTube links where a clue was in a video that then led to a math equation to solve. The idea was that the learning process is more important than the end result (think grades).  Once the box was open it was empty! It was a great way of driving home the point that all class lessons should work the same way where the process can be greater than the product. It would be a cool final project for TSI, but I have to figure out how to create puzzles that would be engaging and relevant enough. Stay tuned!"

If you want to learn more about these things, talk to Kristin or an ITC!