The Northwest Council for Computer Education (NCCE) puts on the best EdTech conference in the Pacific Northwest! The amazing sessions, workshops, and speakers are as high quality as the International Society for Technology Education (ISTE)! Educators from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and all over come to Washington state to attend NCCE’s annual conferences. I’ve been fortunate enough to get to go every year since 2014 and I’m re-invigorated and re-energized every time I go. For those of us who go to conferences it’s our chance to be around 100’s of fellow educators who are passionate about the same things we’re passionate about. In this case, EdTech, AR, VR, Gamification, Game-Based Learning, AI, Best Practices, Gaming, Esports, Minecraft, and geeking out on amazing apps and programs! This year the conference took place at the Tacoma, WA, convention center. I stayed at a hotel that was a short walk through the UW Tacoma to the convention center. I didn’t leave the hotel aside from walking to and from the convention center but I did get a couple of nice pics since the weather for the first two days was just fantastic.
It was another great year full of incredible sessions and workshops and I had a hard time picking which sessions and workshops to attend during each time slot! I put together a Wakelet with all the sessions and workshops I attended and presented. I took a photo at each session and workshop that I attended, Tweeted it out, then added a link to any resources or presentation slides from the session or workshop. If I didn’t share the presentation slides it was because they were temporary so I shared links to their websites.
I kicked off the conference with a session on the changing nature of PD by Jeff Utecht. The keynotes were great as we started with a hilarious keynote by Joe “Mr. G” Dombrowski and a touching and inspiriting keynote at the end by Dr. Jason Neiffer. I attended sessions and workshops on using best practices, strategies, and tools to engage and motivate students to take ownership of their learning and share their learning. I caught a session on badging educators (part of microcredentialing that goes hand in hand with the changing nature of PD), and I attended sessions on VR and AR. I also attended a session on esports, one on game-based learning (GBL) with Minecraft Education and Fortnite Creative, and one of using Minecraft Education for esports! I also attended three sessions on AI and ChatGPT (those two were well represented this year!), and an amazing workshop by Tyler Rablin on HyperRubrics and Learning Progressions! If you want to see presentation slides and resources, check out my Wakelet collection. 🙂
On the second day of this three-day conference I had the pleasure of co-presenting a workshop on Minecraft Education with my friend and co-presenting partner, Tammie Schrader. It was so much fun and after having to present last year virtually it was so GOOD to get to share Minecraft Education with real, in-person, face-to-face people!
Right after our Minecraft Education workshop, I rushed to a session that I got to present in with Jennifer Brown of Prodigy Learning about Coding in Minecraft! I got to share my experiences using Coding in Minecraft with my 5th and 6th graders and that was also so much fun!
Out of 75 fifth and sixth graders, I had 18 complete the entire Intro to Coding course as noted above. I share the above slide showing how my students did after seven weeks of working the course. We are lucky that here in Washington State, as well as in Alaska, Coding in Minecraft is completely free to use (as long as the school pays for Minecraft Education, which is part of the A3 and A5 Microsoft licenses and costs about $5 per student per year). I am deeply honored to have been nominated by Prodigy Learning and also selected as their 2022-23 Teacher of the Year! That was beyond kind and generous of them to do that and I feel like I was just sharing something very cool that I found. I am grateful for the honor.
I did have some fun playing with Midjourney to generate some AI pictures. I learned about Midjourney at one of the AI sessions I attended and here’s what I got when I asked for a class of 6th graders in the year 2324 in orbit around the Earth:
I noticed that even in the year 2324 the kids are dressed very 20th century and they all seem to be white kids. Interesting.
