#AllMeansAll: Tech Help Webinars for IL State Teachers

During April and May 2020, I worked with Teach Plus IL, who, in partnership with ILSTOY and NBPTS, held virtual PLN groups made up of teachers across the state in order to provide support during COVID-19 e-learning and remote-learning initiatives. The project, named All Means All, was an awesome way for educators to connect with other colleagues who taught in the same subject areas and levels and receive a variety of support. 

My part in this campaign was to provide weekly tech help sessions via webinar for any interested teachers. It was really awesome to be regarded as a leader who had some knowledge to share! I love learning about and sharing tech tools that can help make a difference in the everyday lives of teachers, and that can help students better demonstrate understanding or obtain additional help and support as needed. 

I am so grateful to have so many awesome friends and ed tech connections in my professional learning network that I was able to bring some of them in to help me and give Illinois state teachers a better understanding of some essential tech tools for e-learning! 

Here's what we covered:

• 4.23.20: Google Classroom for Beginners
• 4.30.20: Screencastify Basics (ft. Nefertiti Dukes)
• 5.7.20: Flipgrid Fever (ft. Jornea Erwin and Jess Boyce)
• 5.14.20: Google Jamboard for All (ft. Kim Mattina)
• 5.21.20: GSuite Tools, Which Ones to Use?
  (Handout 1: Google Tools | Handout 2: Google Meet)

The sessions above are all linked to the accompanying 1-pager handout that I gave to webinar attendees (with the exception of Jamboard, which is linked to Kim Mattina's website full of awesome resources!).

You can find out more about All Means All on the Teach Plus website here.  

- Mrs L.

A Message from ILSTOY Teachers to All Educators

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! 

Ever since our stay-at-home-order, I've been pretty bogged down with not only teaching from home, but a lot of other outside projects, too. (Have you seen my media page lately? Lots of podcasts, webinars, etc... I know I don't even have them all listed there!) So needless to say, both this blog and Reset EDU channels have suffered as a result... :(

One of my outside projects is a weekly LIVE tech help webinar for teachers across IL state. It's an effort through Teach Plus IL and the ILSTOY network to create PLCs of teachers, no matter where they teach/live in the state, to help them with their remote learning challenges. It's been fun, but intimidating! The first week was all about Google Classroom, and last week we demonstrated Screencastify for teachers. I was lucky to have Nef from Screencastify stop by to take some Q&A from the attendees. This week will be all about Flipgrid, and Jornea has agreed to stop by! I'm pretty excited. Coming up after that are sessions on Jamboard (w/my friend Kim Mattina of The Suite Talk) and Google Suite for Education tools. 

Another project I'm involved with is the ILSTOY (IL State Teachers of the Year) organization. We wanted to do something to help show our support for teaching during our current situation. One of those things is to partner up with ASCD and PBS to support the #SeniorPortrait Campaign "to amplify the voices of millions of high school seniors whose class experiences were dramatically disrupted by the coronavirus shutdown."

Our other project was a short video that we released to show our support and thanks to teachers out there doing whatever they can to help support our students. You can check it out here:

I know that we would love to get as wide a reach as possible with this video! Please share this message on your social media channels and tag a teacher who you know could use a little boost!

- Mrs L.