I spent three days in Palm Springs attending my first CUE conference. Wow, what an experience. I'm so glad that I went and hope that I will be able to attend every year. I enjoyed every session that I attended. However, with so many to choose from I can't help but feel that I missed some great sessions. The schedule was somewhat overwhelming with so many of the sessions at the same time. Choosing was very difficult. I decided to try to attend any sessions with middle or high school math teachers presenting so that I could see which technologies were best suited for math classes. Every subject has its own unique challenges and opportunities and by focusing on math instruction I felt that I would be able to borrow from more experienced teachers in my field and identify a few things I would be able to implement in my future classroom.
I've been intrigued by the flipped classroom model because I think it should work well for math instruction. I remember as a math student thinking that I understood the lesson until I tried to do the math problems for homework and they weren't turning out right. That would be so frustrating to struggle with the problems not knowing what you were doing wrong and not being able to understand your notes. So I was excited to hear what the math teacher presenters had to say about their own experiences flipping their classrooms. While acknowledging that making the videos was very time consuming, they felt that the results were worth the effort. Of course if they had tried it and hated it, they probably wouldn't have been presenting at CUE.
The information that was shared was very valuable, particularly the links that were provided to their favorite products for creating and uploading videos and the lessons that the teachers learned in the process. The presenters shared how flipping their classrooms allowed them to do more interesting math projects in the classroom and to get to know their students better because they had more one-to-one time in the classroom. However, they recommended collaborating with other teachers and starting slowing to reduce the workload which can be overwhelming if you try to switch to the flipped model too quickly. Also, being able to add these experienced instructors to my personal learning network is a great benefit of attending the conference. The willingness of presenters to share not only their experiences but also their materials was inspiring. I've attached a link to the schedule for the conference. By clicking on each session I discovered that many of the presenters included links to their resources in the schedule. I am still in the process of reviewing many of the resources for sessions I wasn't able to attend in addition to those I attended.
An additional benefit of attending the conference in person is the opportunity to win goodies. Perhaps it was because it was my first conference but I was lucky enough to win several drawings. I was thrilled to win a free copy of Camtasia video-making software to help me prepare videos for my flipped classroom. Then the next day, I couldn't believe it when my name was called at the closing session of the conference and I had won the closing raffle of a new Epson multimedia projector.
In addition to what I learned at the sessions, the keynotes were really inspiring. They reaffirmed why I wanted to become a teacher. I think that attending events like this and connecting with teachers who really care about doing the best job they can will help keep me from becoming jaded and burning out as a teacher.
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