Vermont Fest 2024

Opening remarks and Opening Keynote with Richard Culatta, CEO, ISTE

Harnessing AI for Digital Good in Education
Join Richard Culatta, CEO of ISTE+ASCD and author of Digital for Good, for his keynote address at this year's Vermont Fest. As we stand at the intersection of artificial intelligence and education, Culatta will explore how we can leverage AI to enhance learning experiences and what we need to do to prepare students to thrive in a rapidly evolving digital world. Culatta will also discuss strategies for creating conditions for healthy tech use at home and school.

Charlotte Cheng will share how she brings authentic representation to children's books, video games, and EdTech learning experiences. We'll then explore ways you can foster authentic representation in your students' day to day environment through strategies that include identity maps, design thinking, focus groups, and so much more!

This round table will engage with Tech Directors, Network Administrators, and other district personnel on the technical “side of the house” about ensuring back-up strategies, building in best practice cybersecurity methods, and equipment, and considering how a consortia model might serve needs of many of the smaller districts struggling with these issues. This session is seeking a robust conversation on what needs there are in this realm and what a model might look like that could leverage the back-end, back-up, infrastructure to ensure some cyber safe and redundant systems. Come and bring your ideas and needs to this round table discussion.

School librarians are at the forefront of important conversations about the complicated relationship between generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI) and intellectual property. As we see genAI tools showing up in more classrooms, libraries and computer labs, school librarians have the opportunity to be a critical partner in helping students and educators understand the opportunities and implications of our use of these emerging tools.

In this session, we will explore real-world scenarios that dig into the complexity of content creation, ownership and intellectual property rights in a world where genAI is helping people to create art, compose music and write essays. We will discuss specific cases and their potential impact on educational spaces. Through practical strategies and conversation starters, we will work together to prepare ourselves, our colleagues and our students to consider the ethics and the boundaries of what it means to be a writer, a painter, a creator who shares their work with the world.

Link to published slidedeck with some additional resources that you all may find useful.

Experience a lightning fast session that will highlight twenty-five timely trends, innovative technologies, and useful tools.  Completely updated from last year’s Vermontfest session, it will cover technologies for all grade levels and subject areas.  General and specific use artificial intelligence tools will be described. Strategies for addressing the challenges and benefits of teaching with them will be included, along with multiple ways of using AI to save time planning lessons and creating teaching materials. You will see free tools you can master quickly, an update on virtual and augmented reality apps, the largest collections of free authentic artifacts, outstanding video and audio archives, new ways of reaching special needs students, and inexpensive little drones and robots.  Hear about technologies and innovative ideas that do not yet exist at the time this session was proposed.  The term “Electronic Constructivism” was coined by this presenter who will link these technologies to what it is all about: Good Teaching.  No experience necessary - just your curiosity and your enthusiasm about teaching.  The agenda is packed, but you’ll receive links to all resources to explore later.  The session will end with a raffle for techy door prizes.

Join Liz von Nagy for an engaging presentation on library advocacy. Discover how you can share the power of what's happening in your library with all stakeholders; students, teachers, administrators, parents, and school board members, and how your advocacy can affect your library. Participants will learn tips and tricks for creating infographics, how to pull information from Destiny Library Manager, and how to center student voice in your advocacy efforts.

The Children’s Literacy Foundation (CLiF) offers many different grants to schools and libraries that help increase literacy skills by inspiring a love of reading and writing for children in under-resourced communities across VT and NH. Join Cassie Willner and Jana Brown, program managers from CLiF, to learn about these free grant programs and how CLiF can support your innovative efforts to inspire your students! We’ll talk about our grants for elementary schools, eligibility requirements, how to apply, and what we’re looking for with funding priorities. We’ll also share some recent examples of funded projects with creative librarians and educators who utilized technology to enhance their libraries and literacy instruction.

Join us to explore how Essex Westford (Peter Drescher), Harwood Unified Union (Nate Gingras) , and Mount Mansfield Unified Union (Jeff Wallis), are leveraging ClassLink in their districts.
-Challenges they faced before using ClassLink
-From SSO to Rostering and Account Provisioning
-Implementation process
-See what’s new
While this is focused on a particular solution, all will talk about various ways all have explored this topic over the years. Consider how this solution might provide a streamlined means to roster and on/offboard employees.

Is your library prepared for a book challenge? Is your district reviewing library or school board policies? How do you handle student privacy and the freedom to read? Where are the boundaries of the First Amendment in a school library?

This session can help you prepare against censorship and implement vital intellectual freedom best practices within your library.

Meg is was trained through Law for Librarians, a program of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF). It is designed to provide librarians with information about the legal fundamentals of the First Amendment, intellectual freedom, and privacy in order to help ensure legal, consistent library policies and practices.

This session will look at how AI is starting to impact your network from a management and security perspective. We will look at what tools are available today and what we should expect in the future and how you can prepare. Part of the session will be dedicated to a round table forum to hear from the group regarding what schools are doing today and how you would like to leverage AI to improve how you are able to protect and manage your network.

While policy and guidelines are only one part of a district's response to the advent of genAI, they are a critical foundation for your district’s approach. A well-crafted policy and resources to guide classroom practice help teachers and students navigate the shifting landscape of technology that surrounds us. In this hands-on session, we will explore the free AI Policy Starter Kit as a starting point for districts and schools to craft thoughtful and proactive generative AI guidance and policy aligned with their district needs and priorities. We will explore resources in the kit that spark conversations about the range of factors and conditions that go into creating genAI policy, and concrete steps that lead to draft policy and guidance language. Using case studies to guide our thinking, we will create a thoughtful and custom approach to district policy and resources that help our teachers and students feel confident in their ability to navigate complexity with a critical lens.

Link to my slidedeck for this session is here.

Apple’s foray into enterprise device management has been a series of incremental changes that has resulted in current best practices standing in conflict with traditional fleet deployment. Fortunately, Apple has also introduced new tools to deal with these legacy challenges so that now is the prime time to prepare for the future of Apple devices using your organization’s Apple School Manager instance.

In this session, we will set the stage by surveying the history of Apple device deployment in education environments, one which was characterized by user-created Apple IDs that were barely a step away from personal ownership. We will then focus on the two primary challenges this has produced, namely, devices being rendered unusable by Activation Lock when transferring users and the existence of user identities that appear to be organization-based but exist without oversight. We will then do a deep dive in understanding the cause of these issues and establish clear processes for avoiding and ameliorating these situations using tools made available by Apple, including the newly announced process for directly converting Personal Apple Accounts to Managed Apple Accounts.