Goals of the Meeting

The Tech Integration and Design Job Alike took place at AISB, in Budapest. The goal of the meet was to allow tech integrators and ed tech coaches to come together to share successes, failures, resources, and blueprints for transformative learning with technology. Some of the major topics were the ISTE Standards, Integration strategies, and Makerspace/Design. It was a very productive meeting that helped put a lot of things into perspective. It was equal parts inspirational and engaging.

One of the major take-aways was the use of Minecraft in the classroom. It has always been an resource that has interested me as it already has a high buy-in with many of the students across age, gender, and nationalities. Students also stay engaged with tasks within the Minecraft universe for longer than some traditional methods. In this school, they use Minecraft as a major tool for their EAL program, where students have a shared objective in-game which leads to a stronger desire to use a common language to complete the task. As a former ESL and EAL teacher, this was a very interesting use of the technology.

Drones

At AISB, they open up the Drones to the students to use at an early age. They have found a supplier that offers reasonably-priced, rather durable drones that fly using ipads as controls. To practice programming, they use Bee-Bots and Sphero. They have mentioned that if we experience trouble delivering to Turkey, they would be happy items sent to them.

For the older students, they allow the students, they can practice mapping coordinates and auto-flying higher level drones using Mission Planner.
Video of one flight