Share your favorite technology ideas, lessons, strategies, successes, fails, tools....

MCCE is an organization filled with teachers that want to learn about new educational technology "stuff"! What better group to learn from than our own!! Please consider sharing your favorite resource with all of us. Take a minute to fill out the Membership Share Form! If you have trouble with the form, you are welcome to email your response.

MCCE Board of Directors Take a Retreat

Your board of directors attended the first retreat for MCCE this past February. Although many of the board members could not make it, the ones that attended learned a lot about our organization and collaborated on some great ideas for future professional development events. 

Your board of directors members talked about past events like the ISTE and NCCE conference, and our involvement with both organizations - there is a lot of benefits to being involved with both. 

We also brain-stormed some ideas for future staff development events like the Summer Tech Summit - watch for some improvements to MCCE events in the future!

 YouTube Unicorns - high interest and value videos

Submitted by Brett Hoyt

Welcome to YouTube Unicorns. What, might you ask, are YouTube Unicorns? They are YouTube videos and channels that are of high interest and have educational and entertainment value for the classroom. If you have a specific video and/or channel that you think would be of interest to other teachers please feel free to submit the link to me for listing on the YouTube Unicorn Symbaloo. Not all links or channels will be included, but as many as space allows is our goal. Please submit your favorites and check out the Symbaloo below.   Please preview all videos before showing them in your classroom for age appropriateness and content. 
https://www.symbaloo.com/mix/youtubeunicorns

ISTE 2018

Thanks to a grant from Montana MCCE, I had the amazing opportunity to attend the 2018 ISTE Conference in Chicago this past summer. Attending ISTE was such an incredible time to connect with edtech teacher leaders from across our country, and learn from the best of the best. I especially enjoyed being a part of the first ever Seesaw Connect event, where I was able to learn about gamified classrooms, explore innovative PD options, and delve deeper into #BookSnaps.

I really loved the educational playgrounds offered at ISTE. The playgrounds provided a chance to explore digital tools in a hands-on way, with teacher experts available to share ideas and answer questions. Another presentation I loved was Goog-Smacked, with tons of ideas for using Google tools in your classrooms.

If you have an opportunity to attend a conference like ISTE, I encourage you to take it! Connecting with other educators to share ideas and learn from one another is so powerful and rejuvenating! I am excited and ready for the 2018-19 school year to begin!

SYMBALOO - Why you should Symbaloo

Symbaloo is a social bookmarking tool that allows you to save your bookmarks as tiles - no text needed! This is a great tool to provide online links for students who are non-readers and readers alike. Here are a few ways I use Symbaloo.

1. Research projects - I create small webmixes with links to websites that provide answers for students. I then share that with them through Google Classroom. Here is an example for a biography research project.
2. Put online library skills activities in one spot - Embed into your website for easy access.
   
3. Share a collection of audio books with your students, and other teachers!
   

Explore in Docs - Citing your Sources

Something I just learned is that when you are in Google Docs, you can go to Tools > Explore and search the web for information. Once you find an article you want to use, you can click on the " beside the article and it will cite it for your bibliography. It automatically creates the footnote for you. Great when doing research papers.