My #NCCE25 Workshops

This year’s NCCE Conference starts February 26! I was fortunate enough to have two workshops accepted for this year’s conference. I had the pleasure of collaborating with Tammie Schrader again, which is always a bonus for me to get to benefit from her expertise.

I do not seem to get innovative ideas on my own and therefore cannot take credit for all the amazing things I share. What I do is keep my eyes and ears open to get ideas and inspiration from other amazing people. I know something good when I see it!

So, to any of you out there who don’t feel innovative or don’t think you can do things you see others sharing and doing, take it from me – YOU CAN! I copy, copy, copy. I feel guilty when people give me credit because I’m just doing what I see others doing so I want to set the record straight while sharing my presentations for this year’s conference.

For example, my first workshop on Thursday, Feb 27 at 12 noon, Game On: Transforming STEM Education with Minecraft Challenges (yes, I used ChatGPT to come up with that title and now I know to get rid of the colon part) uses a very cool feature from Minecraft Education: the Esports worlds! The idea to use the esports worlds not just for an esports program or club, but for STEM or any other class came from Stephen Reid, @StephenReidEdu, who created those worlds. I never would have thought to use those worlds in my Science class but thanks to Stephen I did and it was great so I’m sharing it with others!

Here are my slides (click here to open in a new tab):

And thanks to the Washington Education Association (WEA) for purchasing Minecraft Education accounts for our teacher training workshops on Minecraft Education, we have accounts for participants to use so that we can all be on the same tenant to join my esports worlds to play together in small teams!

Then there’s the whole AI app-smash idea for my second workshop on Friday, Feb 28 at 11 am, AI App-Smashing: Revolutionizing Classroom Engagement (yes, also generated with ChatGPT), which was also inspired from some very creative and innovative people. I learn a lot and get great ideas from the EduGuardians, @EduGuardian5! I highly recommend following them.

Farmer Faubs, @farmerfaubs, one of the founding #EduGuardians, shared this great idea to have kids use School AI and Canva and Book Creator to create and share trading cards like we teachers have been doing! Brilliant! Again, I never would have thought to do that with students but thanks to Farmer Faubs, I did, and we created a very nice Star Trek themed class book! So I got permission from Farmer Faubs to use her idea and share it myself. Much of what I used for my presentation was also copied/borrowed from other #EduGuardians.

That inspired the following presentation (click here to open in a new tab):

I do enjoy sharing all the wealth of great and innovative ideas I come across, especially cool ways to use AI with students! The ideas I share come from others; I’m just a messenger of good stuff. 🙂

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