Today was a great day at ISTE!  The conference actually doesn't start until tomorrow, Saturday, but they held a Hacked Education session this morning and Holly and I went to that until 12:00.  I attended a Makerspaces session that had quite a few librarians in it.  Yay for the librarians.  :). There was also a session on Gaming for the classroom.  These sessions were very informal and it is always so wonderful to network with others and to share ideas.  We also got to see Jerry the cybrary guy, http://cybraryman.com, who is awesome.

In the afternoon I attended a Mobile Megashare and it was amazing!  The first session was on Gamification (not the same one as before).  This was so informative about how to insert games in to a lesson.  I already use games in centers in the library but this would help take it to the next level.  They recommended a site called RPG.com  for game design help.  Some other helpful sites/information given were: Kodable.com http://www.kodable.com, Gamestar Mechanic https://gamestarmechanic.com (teaches the mechanics of game design) and
Code Monkey Island Board Game to start students out with coding and gaining a basic understanding of coding before actually moving to the computer.

The next session was on Augmented Reality using a site called Aurasma http://www.aurasma.com/about-us/.  The presenter was named Paul Hamilton and he is from Australia.  Now you know he was very interesting to listen to and his tips were good too (ha).  If you should find you are interested in Aurasma, you should definitely look his site up.  His site under aurasma is Ar Educational Experiments.  Some of the helpful sites he mentioned are:
Explain everything http://www.morriscooke.com/?p=134 which is great for overlaying information over your images (an example would be explaining the water cycle).  You do the images and then overlay the explanation over the images through 'Explain Everything'.  Topia World Builder which is an app that let's you create world simulations, Hopscotch https://www.gethopscotch.com which teaches kids to code using simple, intuitive building blocks (borrowed from the google site).  There was so much more but I will move on.

The next session was Makerspaces and Mobile-the Perfect Comapanions!  Led by Laura a and Jim Briggs.  Their site is Bit.ly/makerspacesandmobile and will give you a good idea of what this session was about.  Are you sensing a pattern here?

The last session of the day (I know, I have about put you to sleep but I just have to share) was on BrainPop and Beyond, presented by Andrew Gardner.  Our school actually used Brain Pop and Brain Pop Jr. and it is used all the time.  The videos starring Mobie the robot with his bleeps and note are very engaging and the kids love them.  Andrew told us of a new offering coming soon called Brain Pop ESL which will offer more direct instruction