Tech Talks in education!: Reflecting on the 2019 TLT Symposium

"Technology is the collection of techniques, skills and methods used in the production of goods or services or to accomplish an objective." Knowing this how can you connect the used of technology and a classroom?

On Saturday March 16th the #psuaged20 cohort had the opportunity to see the newest research emerging from Penn State at the Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium! This event was attended by hundreds of students and professors from the university to learn about how we can better our classrooms.

The morning was kicked off with learning about the best advancement in technology, duct tape! Dan Heath, co-author of "Made to Stick" was the keynote speaker and he discussed making things stick with students. From Heath's speech I was able to realize that information isn't going to stick with my students because I talked about the material. It is a patchwork of duct taped resources and experiences that I will give them the lessons I am trying to teach. These lessons might not even be specific content, but skills for the rest of their lives!

After Health's keynote we were able to attend several workshops to look at new technology being released! I attended Adaptive Learning: Multiple Perspectives Learned Through Pilots at Penn State and Open Educational Resources: Moving Beyond the Basics. Between these two workshops I gained insite on different websites to use differentiate the ways my students can receive materials such as textbooks. Helping students learn how to navigate these websites was also highlighted throughout the day since most students would need a way to be taught how to use the websites.

Throughout this experience the biggest take away for me was how important professional development is and that it doesn't always have to be with the same content focus as myself. I learned a lot from the engineer professors and how they are utilizing websites(that are designed with questions based on students content knowledge) to help with conversions for their students. The profession of teaching as a whole can learn from each other. We all can manipulate resources to help fit our needs but, don't all need to reinvent the wheel!