Vermont Fest 2024

Conference welcoming remarks and daily announcements.

Join this interactive roundtable discussion to explore how school districts can align their K-12 technology plans with broader district Strategic Planning Goals and a Portrait of Graduate work. Participants will engage in conversations around critical topics, including the role of facilities, funding, tech infrastructure technology instruction, staffing considerations for adequate tech support, and the development of meaningful, ongoing professional development for teachers. This roundtable fosters collaborative sharing of challenges and best practices, encouraging participants to exchange ideas on ensuring technology initiatives enhance learning, align with district priorities, are future-proof, and provide equitable access for all students.

Josh, Chris, and Mark have real conversations, real arguments, and real banter on IT issues and trends in K12 Schools. In this session, the guys will discuss AI and other hot items in K12 and how tech depts should prepare.

The Vermont Agency of Education would like to have a Ed-Fi Question and Answer session where we can discuss the current Ed-Fi deployment for state reporting. We also wish to review our data governance plans and other areas where we would like to use Ed-Fi to help the state collect and use data in meaningful ways.

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.

FHTMS SOAR Students plan an interactive session geared for participants who are in various parts of their journey toward active antiracism work. S. O. A. R. students will briefly describe their work before launching into practical "hands-on" activities designed to allow participants to
• reflect on their identities and the need for this work
• improve on “Speak up” strategies guided by the work of Teaching Tolerance
• explore both individual and collective aspects of antiracism work
• create tools that can immediately be taken back to your school setting to unapologetically interrupt and disrupt racism within our school systems.

FHTMS SOAR Students plan an interactive session geared for participants who are in various parts of their journey toward active antiracism work. S. O. A. R. students will briefly describe their work before launching into practical "hands-on" activities designed to allow participants to
• reflect on their identities and the need for this work
• improve on “Speak up” strategies guided by the work of Teaching Tolerance
• explore both individual and collective aspects of antiracism work
• create tools that can immediately be taken back to your school setting to unapologetically interrupt and disrupt racism within our school systems.

This workshop aims to equip educators and school staff with a better understanding of copyright law and fair use principles as they apply to educational settings. Participants will explore key concepts of copyright, the importance of respecting intellectual property, and practical applications of fair use in the classroom/library. Through interactive discussions and real-world scenarios, attendees will gain insights into how to navigate copyright issues when using multimedia resources, creating educational materials, and incorporating student work. By the end of the workshop, participants will feel more confident in making informed decisions about copyright and fair use, fostering a respectful and legally sound learning environment.

VSLA Members will gather for time to connect with colleagues and have some fun!

Writing exercises is a 45 minute workshop with an additional Q & A that focuses on the use of figurative language, seeing the world with a poetic eye with the help of some techniques as Metaphors, Similes, Haikus and Senryus.  I also emphasize the importance of how to avoid cliches in writing, keeping notebooks, and showing examples of how some of my own notebook ideas turned into published poems. Participants will be able to create their own poems using their learning about poem structure, point of view and tone analysis. 

I’ll present about the Game Design class I teach for Winooski Middle School! In the class we play games, think critically about those games, and then use an iterative design process to make fun and interesting modifications of those games! I begin the class with Tic Tac Toe, teach them the optimal strategy, and let them quickly realize that the game is dull when everyone is playing optimally and every game ends in a tie. Students are then tasked with making Tic Tac Toe interesting again by incorporating elements of luck (dice, cards), skill (bottle flipping, bean bag toss), or increasing the complexity to deepen the strategic decision making (larger board, new rules). We go on to explore strategy games, card games, dice games, knowledge games, and social games with students developing their own versions of each.

In this workshop we will go through a quickened version of this process and design our own versions of a card game called Golf!

Join Department of Library staff to learn more about the free databases, discussion sets, interlibrary loan services, and professional development resources that the Department offers. Discover resources to support you in providing accessible reading materials to students with IEPs. Learn about the ways that the Department support Vermont youth and how you can take advantage of these free resources.

Come see how to customize ChatGPT Plus using plain English (no programming) to make your own chatbots.

***If you want to make a chatbot in this session, you'll need to have or upgrade to the $20 Month ChatGPT Plus here.***

Teaching AI to make chatbots is a great way to learn about AI and you could end up with something you could use in class. For example, you could make a chatbot that is focused on Vermont history and speaks in the tone and manner of a historical character.

I'll demo an educational chatbot I made called DumbBot! (try it here) and show you how to edit GPT Plus chatbots that can be private or public to users with a free GPT account.

Creating a chatbot is a great way to learn about AI because you can ask GPT for all kinds of help and pointers along the way. You also get to see first hand how your bot hallucinates as you try to control it.