I recently had the privilege of keynoting the Heart of Innovation Conference for Heartland Are Education Agency in Iowa. Their conference centers on using technology in the classroom and ways to build up our competency as educators so that we can work with students more effectively. My keynote, “Starting, Exploring” looks at technology as a starting point for building connections in our educational communities and how we can build competency in ourselves towards a better tomorrow for education. Check out the slides and resources below:

In January 2023 I was asked to speak at UCTE, Utah’s English language teacher conference. They wanted me to explore how we can develop curiosity about working with technology in our classrooms. I was elated; creativity, curiosity, and technology are three areas where I love to explore intersections.

Role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons are a wonderful way to provide opportunities for students to learn storytelling, collaboration, and communication in a classroom environment. Through learning by doing, participants in this session will learn how to create and play a classroom role-playing game with students.

Photography is an amazing gateway for students to express their ideas on a variety of topics both in the photo and in the process. In this playground session, come learn how to make a cinemagraph and gifs using Adobe Creative Cloud. We will also explore content area possibilities for using photography, particularly cinemagraphs and gifs, as choice-based projects.

Utah’s Online School Library (UOSL) is a virtual library designed for all Utah publicly-funded K-12 students and teachers. UOSL allows users to research and share resources from databases, including Culture Grams, EBSCO, Gale Reference, Scrible, Soundzabound, eMedia, and Preschool Pathways. UOSL provides a model for other organizations to fulfill the needs of educators and learners in their own constituencies. The reference materials in UOSL are designed to support “lifelong skills of selecting information from a wide variety of sources, assessing its worth, and applying newfound knowledge to problems, preparing them for learning, doing, and problem-solving in college, career, and throughout life.” (Utah Core Information Literacy Standards). Come learn with UOSL!

One of the most difficult things for educators, particularly with more tools available than ever, is to find tools and resources of value and put them into action in their classrooms.

Whether an educator is trying to build their understanding of a particular pedagogical practice (UDL, UBD), a technology tool (AI, SAMR, TPACK), or creating a list of possibilities for their students, curating and correlating resources can be the most difficult part of our jobs.

Adding an outdoor classroom to an existing school provides students and educators with ample opportunity and reason to spend class time outside. However, developing appropriate and technologically enabled lesson plans for these excursions is incredibly important to the development of the space and to providing engaging learning opportunities for students.

Educator podcasts are an effective and timely way to provide professional development and allow educators to share their stories. Through collaboration between three Utah educator podcasts, we have created an educator podcast network that helps provide opportunities and professional development to educators from Utah and beyond.

Creating and building breakout rooms continues to be an innovative process in classrooms. However, finding starting points and developing an appropriate curriculum can be difficult. This session solves that problem by providing appropriate and scalable ways you can engage students with escape rooms.

Over the course of ISTE Live 2023, I will be adding resources, ideas, social media posts, and more to this Wakelet Collection. It will be organized by when I attend sessions from the beginning of the conference to the end.

If you are presenting or come across an amazing resource that you would like to share (with permission), please feel free to email me at matt@teacherwinters.net and I will get it added to this collection. Thanks!

There are many entry points to understanding artificial intelligence and sharing it with your students, but one some of the best ways to explore AI are right in your Chromebook. Through an exploration of Google Arts & Culture, Applied Digital Skills, and Practice Sets educators and students alike can experience AI and start to build their skills with engaging practice and thoughtful collaboration with AI. We will explore fun starter points with Google Arts & Culture experiments and games that help learners explore AI in tangible engaging ways. In order to help facilitate deeper learning in our students we will explore some Applied Digital Skills lessons and some possibilities for student-created AI-infused artifacts. Finally, we will explore the possibilities for AI as a learning partner in Practice Sets and how that can support personalized and competency-based learning goals for educators.

In March 2022, I attended SXSWEDU week. After an amazing session on comics in education, I walked across the hall to the d.school’s Future(s) Museum. I knew the d.school, like many, from exploring design thinking and its applications in education, but I was not prepared for what I was in for at the conference. The d.school had set up an amazing maker space that guided participants through designing for their future descendants.

One of the most important things when implementing new technologies into a system, particularly an educational system is to try and understand the different ways it might affect different levels of the organization. I worked in restaurants for a long time in college.

There is just so much out there on artificial intelligence right now. Just spending a few minutes exploring social media and what is being said by experts, armchair experts, and laypeople alike can make it hard to discern the best responses to AI’s boom over the last few months.

The last few weeks of my work life have revolved around artificial intelligence. I am working on a course for Utah Education Network on AI in schools called The AI Frontier. The course is meant to be an introduction to AI in classrooms beyond trying out an AI and seeing what it can help you do (albeit sometimes poorly).

If you go to ISTE23 in Philadelphia this year, make sure that you make some time for Playgrounds. They are short table presentations by experts all centered around the same topic and they help to get some personal connections to content and ask your questions to experts who can help you build your understanding.

I, like many of us in educational technology, have been somewhat taken away by AI over the last few months. ChatGPT, Dall e, and Midjourney have been weekly, if not daily, topics of discussion, along with AI policy, frameworks, assignments, and assessments in education. For example, just in the past week I have run an edcamp session on AI in schools, developed coursework for an AI course, and shared a presentation with a local educator team on creativity and AI.

When I was a kid I really wanted to make videos. Being able to capture and then slice together scenes to make a movie was always so intriguing. I remember watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade too many times as a teenager and just loving how scenes were cut to make movement or tension. However, I didn’t have a camera or a computer that would edit footage or a school with those tools. So, out of practicality, I put those aspirations on the shelf until I was a teacher.

One of the fundamental issues facing educators is a two-fold problem. One is the amount of attention we are able to give each day to the larger educator community. Whether it is a new program in your school, a strategy from your local or state board, or a blog post from a national figure, finding attention to give each day come be complex and difficult.

I attended my first UCET in 2018. I had just come back from SXSWEDU week and I was on fire for more ideas and community. At the suggestion of my good friend, Quin Henderson, I headed to the University of Utah and joined the conference. I was excited to talk to a lot of the speakers as part of our podcast project at the time, Edtrex Rewind, and to just take in the conference. It was the first time that I had attended a state-level education conference and I was tickled by how much fun I had throughout the event.