This conference simply gets better every year as far as the depth and breadth of the presenters that are selected. There are no gimmicks, no tech how-to's, only an abundance of inspiration, creativity, and innovation. 

The real power for me in this conference is attending it with people from my campus. We come to the conference with the advantage of sharing a campus mission and a common language which makes conversations deeper and more meaningful. The Instructional Partner on our campus, Kelly Van Meter, and I spent a good deal of time in the same sessions which allowed us to listen for and share in conversations about concepts that would be appropriate for us to share with our campus. As powerful as that collaborative experience is, even more powerful was spending time debriefing with the two teachers that attended this year, Kaley Coffield and Aimee Smith. Kelly and I have made it a tradition to kick off the week with breakfast at Maria's Taco Stand complete with discussions about which sessions we are most looking forward to. We try to meet up for lunches when we can and we schedule a debrief at the end of the convention as our culminating event. I am always so impressed with the profound effect that this conference has on the teachers we share it with. Aimee told us that she feels like she spends her days between 4 walls with 22 students, but for this week she got to see the world. I wish that all of our teachers could share in this type of experience. 

I am really enjoying using the iPad app, Paper 53, to Sketchnote my conference notes. Visible Thinking keeps me focused during the sessions and I have found that I retain information far better than if I had simply typed the notes. 

Here are some of my notes from the conference. 

EE Principal, Lesley Ryan and I, have spent a lot of time this school year delving into Visible Thinking/Sketchnoting in its various forms. Lesley is a wonderful mentor. She is incredibly creative and positive and has been the perfect teacher/encourager for me in this endeavor. I started this journey very much with the attitude that I was not at all artistic so how could I take this on? With Lesley's help, I have made some real progress in overcoming my fears and having more of a growth mindset about this. 

So a couple of months ago, we decided we wanted to try this out in a classroom. We started with Third Grade and then once we became more confident, we offered it up to other grade levels. 

Here is a little bit about what we are doing in these classrooms. 

We incorporate a lot of Lesley's Sketchnotes into our presentation and are  trying to incorporate more student and teacher created pieces. This one was created by one of our Fourth Grade teachers, Natalie Brewer. 

The Elementary Ed Techs did a training on our campus last week in which we used Nearpod to present information on Visible Thinking. While giving an overview of the basics of Sketchnoting, we took time to point out the features of Nearpod that we had incorporated in the presentation. 

Two very positive things happened this week as a result of that training. One was an increase in Nearpod usage across the campus due to a new awareness of the features that teachers have access to now based on their upgraded status as District Users. 

The second is the way in which teachers have embraced the idea of using Visible Thinking with students. Here is a perfect example. 

Elizabeth Dodge and Mary Ann Simmons have begun to use Sketchnoting in two ways that had never occurred to me before. 

1. In FIT, when students are given passages to read, they are having them read a paragraph and then draw a quick picture of what that paragraph is mainly about. Elizabeth told me that the results were fairly amazing as the students could quickly go back and look at their drawing and know exactly what the main idea of that paragraph was. She said that it was way more effective than the practice of simply underlining and circling key words in a paragraph. 

2. 5th Graders are doing a novel study on Hatchet now and at times the students read along in their own books as the teacher is reading out loud. Mary Ann and Elizabeth decided to use Sketchnoting as a way to help students stay engaged and retain more of the information they were reading. They gave each student one of the larger varieties of Post-it notes and asked them to sketch the important details in the chapters they were reading. Mary Ann reported that when one student was asked to explain to a student who had been absent the day before what the previous chapter was about, he simply pulled out his Sketchnote and began to retell the chapter with great clarity and detail. 

I am including two samples for you to look at!