TCEA 2018 -

OK...so I'm a little exhausted, but look below for highlights from today!!!

This awesome thing actually comes from a presentation I did with my husband Gary who is the Technology director at Broaddus ISD. He also teaches a Principles of Engineering class there and they get to build cool things that I'm jealous of. In case you don't know this class is where we got the idea for our AR sandbox. They have now designed & built a streamline version of an AR Sandbox!

I also got to tell people how awesome our AR Sandbox is and showed the audience a video of how we use it. They especially liked how Mrs. Ingram told about how one of her ELL students finally understood the word "steepness" by using this great teaching tool! And our fabulous Technology Director, Josh Smith did a fantastic job of explaining how our own sandbox was constructed. So shout out to you two!

Here is a link to a website that tells you all about the sandbox. It is very cool that his entire district can now enjoy an AR Sandbox because of this design!

An extension to the Mackin Via booth caught my eye today because I saw some coding stuff. I was like, "Wait, I thought MackinVIA was just for keeping your library cataloging and info together?" I was so wrong. They have another thing called Mackin Makers with some great products for all age ranges and a website that is impressively organized. (Of course it is because librarians are in charge of it!)

Here is their website. Like I said it is very organized and easy to navigate and even has videos to go with each product! If you interested in STEM activities and/or coding you could probably find cool stuff here.

On a unplugged note - The product pictured to the right completely captured my attention.

In case you are not familiar with BrainPOP Jr....Annie is a character like Tim is on regular BrainPOP. See her picture to the right. Anyway I got to meet her today. She's a real person and not a little kid obviously. Of course I didn't take a selfie, dang it!!! BUT....I told her about our Student accounts not working and she quickly emailed and they are helping Robert sort it out!!!! I'll keep you posted.

PS - I totally nerded out when I got an email from "annie@brainpop.com."

I had never heard of this company before and they had the cool robot pictured to the right dancing in their booth. So I had to go over....Very impressive curriculum that has multiple lessons with each lab you purchase, very impressive equipment, and as you can see in the picture below they move beyond drag and drop coding to actually "writing" of code which I think we need more of at the MS level. Here is their site!

NOT cheap but not totally unreachable.

Texas Gateway gets lost in the sea of online resources we have, but you can find some good stuff on there. The company Study Edge has teamed up with TEA to provide study guides and videos for Chemistry, Physics, Precalculus & Statistics. I know those are HS courses, but I know how you guys use resources from all grade levels and the quality of this stuff looked good. So I thought I'd pass it along! I'm providing a link to the directions on how to access this! And for more info go here.

Email: mitchellm@hudsonisd.org
Phone: 936-875-9295
Twitter: @MistyMitchellm