Educational Technology at IU13

We are very pleased and excited to announce the Keynote for our Elementary and Secondary Technology Conferences at Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13 on Dec. 11-12, 2018 is Tom Murray. "Tom serves as the Director of Innovation for Future Ready Schools, a project of the Alliance for Excellent Education, located in Washington, DC. He has testified before the United States Congress and works alongside that body and the US Senate, the White House, the US Department of Education and state departments of education, corporations, and school districts throughout the country to implement student-centered, personalized learning while helping to lead Future Ready and Digital Learning Day. Murray serves as a regular conference keynote, was named one of “20 to Watch” by NSBA, the “Education Policy Person of the Year” by the Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and “Education Thought Leader of the Year” in 2017. His latest book, Learning Transformed, was released in 2017 with ASCD. Connect with him at thomascmurray.com or @thomascmurray."

Yesterday, on March 6, 2018, we had close to 300 Schoology users attend our 1st Annual Schoology ConnectPA at Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13. Ken Zimmerman welcomed the crowd and introduced Schoology's Director of Instructional Strategy, Kellie Ady who provided the Keynote focusing on student-centered learning. Participants had over 25 sessions to choose from to learn and collaborate using instructional strategies focused on student learning within the Schoology LMS.  Users joined a Schoology ConnectPA course in order to access the schedule matrix of sessions and session resources for the entire day.  In addition, participants played a "game challenge" in order to get to know the platform and other users in the conference which led to winning Schoology Swag at the end of the day.  We are pleased to announce that starting today, our first Schoology ConnectPA group will launch as a public group for all PA educators to join, share, and collaborate with ideas and resources focused on maximizing teaching efficiencies and student learning.  Feel free to search our public Schoology group and join us!

Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13 along with Lincoln Intermediate Unit 12 have partnered with Schoology to host the 1st annual Schoology Connect PA on March 6, 2018. What is a Connect you may ask? Connect is a grass roots effort of districts and organizations coming together to provide more in depth professional learning opportunities centered on using Schoology as the platform. Users wanted to collaborate and share educational strategies all while using Schoology in order to promote communication, collaboration, and infuse ed tech strategies in order to maximize student learning. Last year only a few Connects around the United States existed while growing to 7 Connect events this year alone. With the support of Schoology, we are excited to bring Schoology Connect to PA this March!

We had an amazing 2 days of the Elementary and Secondary Technology Conferences at Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13. Over 400 educators from k-12 were present to share, learn, collaborate, and celebrate this year's theme, "Let's put FUN back into learning"! Our Keynote this year was Adam Bellow, former classroom teacher, educational technologist, and co-founder of Breakout EDU. Adam challenged us to focus on the many facets of how students learn through innovation, creation, and experimental design thinking all while encouraging an atmosphere of risk taking.