 Welcome everyone, it is the fifth session of our Tech Integration is Success series. We are so excited that you are joining us here today to get inspired, get some ideas, and try something with the teachers that you support. I'm Angela, you probably already know me. I taught kindergarten for 15 years, and I lead the community team here at CSAH. Make sure you find me on Twitter. Let me know how you are using some of the ideas that we are sharing. We would love to hear from you. What can you expect in this series if you are just joining us for the first time? We are really here to support you, inspire you, and provide you with connections, hopefully with others in a similar role that you have. We talk about a variety of topics, lots of ideas and resources, and again, hoping to build that community of people that you can reach out to and bounce some ideas off of. We have all of our sessions on our YouTube channel, so definitely check that out as well. And if you haven't formally registered or just watching this recording and think, how do I get in on this next one? This is where you will go to register. We meet the second Wednesday of each month. So make sure you join us next time. We'll have some more fun in December as well. And as a reminder, if you are viewing this session, you are able to get a certificate of completion. So what you'll need to do is just listen for a six-digit code that Matt will be giving you during the presentation, and then you use that to get your certificate. You will find a link to that in the description of the video or in the follow-up email as well. But if you're live and listening to our voice right now, you're all set. You don't need to do anything. It will come via email to you in just a couple of days. Today we are really excited. Our topic is 27 Tips to Deliver Powerful PD, and we are really excited and thrilled to have with us today Matt Miller. Matt Miller taught in public schools for more than 10 years, teaching all levels of high school Spanish. In his career, he planned nearly 12,000 class lessons. He taught more than half a million instructional minutes, and he graded work for nearly 2,000 days of class. His book and blog, both titled Ditch That Textbook, have equipped and inspired tens of thousands of educators in more than 100 countries. He lives in West Central Indiana and says that he's living the dream, happily married with three kids, two dogs and a mortgage. And we are so excited to have Matt here with us today. I came upon this amazing blog post where he was sharing these 27 tips and ideas, and I knew our community could be inspired and get those little gems and nuggets to really share and put to use with all of the teachers that you work with. So Matt is going to turn on his webcam. I am going to give control over to Matt so he can share his presentation with us. And we are going to get cruising today. Welcome, Matt. All right, thank you so much. Hey, everyone, it's so good to be with you today. Coming to you here from from Indiana, where it is cold. It's like unseasonably cold. We just got about three inches of snow. So we had our first snow day of the year last yesterday. And so, yeah, I was super excited to get to chat with all of you today. As far as, you know, talking about this this topic. And I'm not sure. Sorry to do this, Angela. I'm not sure how to do the the slides. Is there any way you can take that back and advance the slides for me? Sure, I totally can do that. OK, cool. All right, she's got it. See, we're being we're being real here. We're just keeping it real. So this is the real deal, right? I love it. I love it. Yeah, absolutely. So so whenever I go go do professional development, sometimes I sneak in there and I say if I'm having some trouble like this, I say it doesn't make any of you feel any better that the guy who's presenting on technology is having trouble with his technology. A lot of times people are very happy. We're all right. Yes, yes, absolutely. So so yeah, I've been doing professional development probably for six or seven years or so, you know, starting with breakout sessions at conferences and after that doing some full day workshops with schools. A lot of times I bounce around to different schools and school districts and keynote speeches and all of that. And so I found that, you know, for me, there's there's been a lot of lessons that I've learned, a lot of things that I've had to learn the hard way. And a lot of things that I've learned from people who do really well at professional development. And so just not too long ago, I just sort of did a brain dump of all of the things that that I believe about professional development into this blog post. And it was called 27 Tips to Deliver Powerful Professional Development. And so the link that you've got on your screen at ditch that textbook dot com slash powerful PD, that's where you can find that blog post. And the sad part about what we've got today is that we've got a limited amount of time and 27 tips. So I'm I'm just certain that I'm not going to get to all of them. But if you want to read through all of them, you can certainly go check them out. And so let's dive right into the first one, which is to use the problem solution framework. And I know sometimes whenever we plan professional development, it's easy to think about, you know, what's the tool that I want to tell them about? What's the, you know, what's the strategy that I want to tell them about? But I think that it's important that we think about what, you know, instead of thinking about what we want them to do, if we start with the problem that it solves, I think that's kind of important, you know, to ask ourselves, what are the problems that these these teachers are facing? Or what's the problem that what I'm giving them solves? And then we get if we use that as a guide, then, you know, that sort of shows them how we're able to solve that problem for them. So if they walk into the room and we're handing them the things to try in their classroom, or we're saying, you should do this now, you should do this. And they're going, yeah, but how is that going to help me? You know, I've talked to so many teachers that have felt this way. And, you know, really when they say, how is that going to help me? The real question I think that they're asking is, what's the problem that this solves for me? And so if we if we keep that in mind from the beginning, then they're able to walk out of the room and know that they've got something that will help them. So that's the first one. And so if we move on to the next one, the next one is and this is something that I've heard of more in like a business setting. This is kind of like a sales thing. And I don't want to say sales. Some of you are like, I'm not a sales person, don't do that. But this is just like this is just human nature. So stick with me. OK, this one is enter the conversation that they're already having in their heads. You know, a lot of times teachers in professional development already have this narrative in their heads, kind of like an inner monologue, you know, about what they're what they're saying and what they're thinking. And so what we can do is I think we can use clues to figure out what the conversation is so that we can join that conversation. So there's a variety of ways that we can pick up on those clues to know what that narrative is, what's going on in their heads. You know, sometimes it's just simply body language and facial expressions that we can pick up on and, you know, try to respond to as we go. And then sometimes we can join that narrative just by simply asking them, you know, before we start, ask them some questions or maybe in the days leading up to it. Another way when in the days leading up to it, something that's interesting is sometimes we can pull on things through like social media or any discussions that we have with people. I know sometimes just keeping an eye on Twitter or even asking a question on Twitter, sometimes that'll pull out opinions or thoughts or preconceived notions that people have that I didn't expect. And sometimes if I do that, you know, that's that's really helpful to work with the teachers that I'm working with. And then, of course, you don't want it to stop there because that conversation that they've had in their heads all throughout we can make ourselves better afterwards. I think if we ask them about that, so if we get an opportunity to ask them some questions, either verbally face to face or through a survey afterwards, then we know what that conversation was and we're able to serve the other teachers that we work with in the future a little bit better. So that's that's another option there. So the next one is to customize professional development to their unique needs. And I'm guessing that there's probably lots of you that already are masters at this. I know some of the best professional development specialists, tech integration specialists that I know are the ones that really do this and do it well. So, you know, it's sometimes it's something just as simple as sending out a Google Forms survey ahead of time, just to see what they're interested in. You know, maybe we ask them about their struggles. Again, we're going back to that problem solution framework, given them the opportunity to pick from some of the topics that you're that you're good at facilitating or even if you're willing to stretch yourself, maybe picking topics that are not really in your wheelhouse, but, you know, doing the work ahead of time to try to improve on that before you before you present. And when they feel like they're they're part of the process, I think that they're a lot of times more invested. I know that I always am whenever I go into the presentation and I know that I've had a say in it, you know, I think that that's that's really powerful. So, yeah, any way that we can customize to teachers needs is a good way to go. So the next one, start with the pain point. And I have to stop real quick and say that the little icon here I thought was was hilarious. I use icons from the noun project, which you can find at the noun project dot com. I plug them into my presentations all the time. I actually have a noun pro account, so I'm actually a paid member of the noun project. And so I'm always pulling these icons into the things that I do. And I thought I typed in the word pain and I found this one. This is a person pricking their finger on a cactus. And, you know, there's there's probably some connections to the pain points that teachers feel in their classrooms and pricking your finger on a cactus, you know, it probably feels just as painful in some ways that they've got some of those struggles that they go through. And, you know, I like to use the term felt need here. It's not just a need that they need, but it's something that they that they feel. And so I think when we focus our solutions towards eliminating that pain, you know, before we were talking about what's the problem and then what's the solution in this case, you know, thinking about how can we eliminate that pain? And I know for me, whenever I've worked with teachers, a lot of times one of their biggest barriers is time. I don't know if you've ever noticed this before, but for me as a teacher and with a lot of the teachers I've worked with, they've told me that time is one of their biggest barriers. So a lot of times, whenever I do professional development, I try to gear my solutions towards that barrier, time. And so I'm looking for ways to help them to start to make a change right away that's going to help save them time or help save their students time so that they can use that time for what matters most. So that's that's yet another one. So Angela mentioned a code earlier. I want to make sure that I give you that code before I forget. And so this is the number. So get ready to write this down, OK, or type this in. Your code is 736-281 736-281. See, I even went all old school and I put it on a sticky note. Can you see it? 736-281. Yeah, thanks. Thanks. See, and I'm not all just digital. See, I'm all sorts of analog, too. So there we go. 736-281. I think I threw that trash can. No, it was really close. OK, anyway, here's another one that I found super, super useful. And a lot of times we talk about this one when it comes to teaching students. But I found that this is so important when working with teachers, too. And it's this quote. And there's a variety of different ways that this quote is shared. But on this slide, it says they might forget what you said, but they won't forget how you made them feel. And I know a lot of times I've gone in and I've done workshops and breakout sessions and even keynote speeches. And I know that the way that teachers felt through my message was one of the biggest things that they took away. And there's going to be a lot of it that they forget, especially if I do a full day workshop or if I do an after school PD or breakout session, there's a lot of it that they're going to forget. But the way that we make them feel is huge. So I know for me, a lot of times, I try to take every opportunity that I can to make teachers feel welcome. So as they're coming in, I'm giving them that smile at the dorm, saying hello, trying to greet them by name if I can. Because we know that there's lots of brain research that talks about how your mood and how your emotions play into your cognition. And so when we're wanting teachers to show up and to feel like they're ready to learn and that they're ready to know that they're ready to take on some new things for their classroom. We want them to be dialed in mentally and to do that, a lot of times we can help them to dial in emotionally too. In the book, The Happiness Advantage, which I actually have a copy of right here. Gonna look for one more second, going once, going twice. Yeah, it's over here somewhere. It's written by Sean Acor. And one of the big takeaways I had from that book was, he says that people are 31% more productive when their emotional state is at positive instead of at neutral or at negative. I like to use my hands like this because it's like a dial, like a fuel gauge. And so whenever we're at positive, we're way, way more productive according to his research. And so I'm looking for ways to turn that dial to positive. So if someone struggles, I like to help them feel like that that struggle is it's easy to fix. No big deal, that's okay, don't worry about it. We can get that fixed in no time. If they make a mistake, then I like to help them to feel like it's, it's nothing, it's not a big deal. Oh, that's okay, we can handle that. If something goes wrong and it's not their fault, I make sure that they know that it's not their fault. And so I think that's a super important part that sometimes when we think about what they need to learn, sometimes we forget about their emotional state. And teachers are just like students in many ways when it comes to that. So I think that one, that one's super important. Okay, here's where it's gonna start to get weird, okay? This is just me and my own unique personality coming out here. Meatloaf has been kind of like a staple in our house for a long time. I like meatloaf. Some people are kind of grossed out by meatloaf. I don't know if you've ever had it before, but basically what you've got is you've got ground beef and then there are some other kind of like filler things inside of it. Sometimes people will put breadcrumbs in it. Sometimes they'll actually like tear up pieces of bread. Sometimes, I mean just a variety of things that they'll put in their meatloaf. In fact, if you're typing in comments here into the chat, I would love to hear if you do meatloaf what your add-ins are to the meatloaf. Well, I think I know for our household, if we're serving meatloaf, my kids like it because they like the way that the meatloaf tastes. They like it for the taste. That's why they like a lot of things that they eat. But what my wife and I will do sometimes is we will grind up vegetables. Broccoli, cauliflower, whatever and mix it into the meatloaf to give it a little bit more nutritional value. And the great thing is is that the kids still have the same taste, but they've got a little bit more of that nutritional value in it because it's got that stuff ground up in it. And I've started to try to approach professional development in the same way. So what I like to do is I like to give the sizzle to the teachers that I'm working with. I like to look at what is it that they want. I've found this a lot in conferences by seeing which breakout sessions are the ones that are like packed to the gills. So I know for a fact that like 60 apps and 60 minutes, they all want to know about the apps. They want to know about a lot of times for me, Google things end up getting a lot of it. Student engagement things, fun things like escape rooms and breakouts and all of that. Teachers have been all about that kind of stuff. And so if I know that that's the kind of stuff that they want, that's great. That's the meatloaf. Again, if you're not a big fan of meatloaf, you can come up with another analogy. Let's assume at least that people like meatloaf for the case of my analogy, okay? So if that's that, then I'm gonna give them what they want, but what I also wanna do is provide some extra nutritional value for it too. So I'm going to grind up some pedagogical cauliflower and broccoli and all of that. Because I found that a lot of times teachers won't like show up for ways to infuse Webb's depth of knowledge into your classroom. They're like, oh, I have depth of knowledge, blooms taxonomy, oh, it just like it hurts them to try to talk about this. But I found that if I can infuse little bits of that into the things that they love, they will start to use it. So instead of going, here's the pedagogy, here's the best practice, here's the brain research, here's all of that nerdy stuff that makes learning happen that's not as much fun. I'm gonna give them what they want, but package it in a way so that they get a little bit of that nourishment. And surprisingly over time, all of that nourishment starts to add up. The meatloaf approach, there you go. We're a little bit hungry, I think right now, Matt. I hope so, assuming that you like meatloaf, I guess. Right, right, good point, good point. Yeah, exactly. Angela, how are we doing on time? We've got about 25 minutes till the end, so we're doing okay. Okay, good, all right, so we can keep plowing through. So, all right, so the next one, this is the next one about let them share. So I know when I started doing workshops and professional development, I felt like, my job is to come in and to provide value and to give the teacher something that they didn't have before, something that'll be useful to them. And the reality is that that's true, that is why you've come. But I know for me as a teacher, I don't wanna sit through professional development and just sit and get. I don't wanna just sit and listen. I wanna be involved in it, of course, right? And so after a while, I started giving more and more opportunities for my participants to share, how are you using this in the classroom yourself? Or if you've seen this idea now in this professional development, think about how could you potentially use this in class? And I like to start turning the, kind of like turning the spotlight, turning the microphone over to them as much as possible. And for a while, I used to have this complex almost about turning that over to them because I felt like that's why I'm here. But the truth is is that that mixes up the voices. So now we've got some contrast. It's not all just me, it's also them. But it also puts them on guard because now I'm saying, okay, I'm not gonna do the talking here, you all are gonna do the talking. And so now they start to see that and it kind of changes the dynamic and it makes that a little bit less monotone and monologue and all of that. So that's one of the things that I really like. Now, when it comes to that, and that's what this next slide is, I have just recently come across this book. I just started reading this like a week ago or so. And so it's this book called The Coaching Habit. Say less, ask more and change the way you lead forever. Really, really like this book. And so what it's all framed around, this whole book is framed around these seven essential questions for coaching. And I think that it's written specifically for people in the business world. But I think whenever we're doing professional development, these are so helpful. And so these are the seven essential questions. Now, as I was reading the book, they sort of like slowly released them out to me. So I almost feel like this is spoiler alert here. I'm giving you all of the questions. So if you get the book, you're gonna know what the questions are ahead of time. But yeah, I mean, some of these just as simple as what's on your mind and what else? Those two go together really well. If we wanna know how we can solve the problems, problem solution, this is an easy way to ask to get some information about what the problems are. And this is again, something that if you have a big room of people, maybe is best done ahead of time. Either through a back channel while they're getting ready to start, maybe a Google Form Survey ahead of time so that we know what's on their mind. Now, the interesting thing is when you ask somebody what's on their mind, they'll give you the first bit of it. And it's amazing to see how much more they will give you if prompted. So this question and what else can elicit a lot of responses. And it kind of feels like, it almost feels like you're being a little bit lazy, like and what else? That just seems to me counterintuitive. But the reality is that if you ask and what else, a lot of times people will give you more. What's the real challenge here for you? I love this question because whenever we start to peel back what's on their mind, what we wanna do is solve those problems. And so asking, what is the real challenge here for you? It's worded really well that it starts to help us figure out what we can do to help. What do you want? How can I help? I love this other one too. If you're saying yes to this, what are you saying no to? And I know sometimes teachers don't have the ability to say no to certain things, but I think this is an important one for priorities. And then I like this last one too. What was most useful to you at the end? That's kind of like that metacognitive part. We want our students to think about their thinking and think about their learning. And sometimes we don't give the teachers that we're working with the same opportunity. So I thought those are really, really good questions. I've just kind of breezed over those. But if you like the idea of that, this is a really good book. I've really, really enjoyed it. So we'll keep moving. Make professional development about teaching and learning. This goes back to the Milofer approach a little bit. Because I know for a while, I used to do tool-centric professional development. You know, the ones where we say, oh, look at this cool tool. Look at this app. Look at this website. Here are all of the features that it has. Amazing. I know your minds are blown. Drop the mic. Walk away. And I used to make the assumption that teachers were able to draw the lines between the dots. You know, it connects the dots between, here's this neat tool and here's how you can use it in the class. But the reality is that between those two things, here's the tool and here's how you can use it in the classroom. Between these two things, there is this huge chasm. This is like this great big canyon between those two things. And it's our job to help build a bridge between those two things so that they can see it. So for instance, you know, a lot of times, if we're gonna make professional development about teaching and learning, you know, some of the things that you might learn in a teacher prep program about pedagogy. For me, I've learned a lot recently. That's not, I'm not saying that I know a lot, but I've picked up a lot about things like web step of knowledge, revised blooms taxonomy, which by the way, if you haven't seen revised blooms taxonomy or if you haven't picked it up since your teacher prep program, this thing is amazing. It is just full of a whole bunch of really useful stuff that teachers can use to create new lesson ideas. Universal design for learning, understanding by design, you know, some of those things are the, that's like the stuff that makes up great lessons. But sometimes we skip over that because we wanna get to the tools and because we wanna think about how am I gonna get this lesson plan done? And I think if we can start to infuse those things, make that kind of like your broccoli and your cauliflower inside of your meatloaf, at that point, it becomes more about the teaching and learning, how can we use this? How is this better than what we were doing before for learning? And then that way it's more about teaching and learning and it's less about the tools. So that's one that I've found to be super, super helpful. Be your own unique self. I did a little bit of this earlier when I talked about meatloaf and I was, see, I was very vulnerable with you and I was like, meatloaf is for me, maybe it's not for you, but hey, that's who I am, you know? So whoever you are, let your, I really hope that you will let your personality shine through. If you are goofy, for heaven's sake, be goofy. If you're a little bit more serious, hey, that's totally fine. If you have a skill or a talent, maybe look for ways that that can play into your professional development, you know? I'm gonna go as far as saying, if you can sing or play an instrument, a musical instrument, that's gonna be memorable. So maybe be vulnerable and take a risk and pull in some of those talents, whatever your talents are, whatever your unique personality is. If you can draw or at least you're willing to try, then maybe sketching, you know, sometimes I'll have a whiteboard behind me. I did this at one conference in particular. I was in a group of like three or four people and we were all bouncing ideas around and bouncing ideas off of the participants. And while we were all talking, I was up at the whiteboard and I was sketching because I liked to sketch note. I've just done a lot of it. I'm not great at it, but I like to sketch note. And so I turned the whiteboard into this great big sketch note. And you know what? That was a whole different dynamic than what they would have gotten otherwise. And I was shocked to see that when we were done, people were up there taking pictures of it. And the reason that it worked out was because I was willing to take my own unique self, my own skills and talents and show them off. And it's not because I'm highly skilled in it at all. I'm not, but I was willing to go out on a limb and give it a shot anyway. So you might just kind of take inventory of what are those unique skills, talents, those unique things about your personality. And you know what? You just be you because people love to see who others are uniquely and truly, this one. Remember how important this work is. Because I think sometimes we get into professional development and it's easy to think about, I need to teach them about this. I need to show them this. Oh, I've been doing professional development with this group for a while and oh man, some of them just like rolled their eyes at me and some of them are just totally checked out and it's easy to get into that stuff. But you know what? Let me just remind you a couple of things. The impact of what you do in professional development as a tech integration specialist or whatever your role is is so important. And just try to remember that because it's exponential. See, I do professional development full-time now and it kills me sometimes to realize that I don't have a class of kids. And I'll bet that you're probably like that to some extent. But what we have to remind ourselves is the ripple effect that we get to have because it starts with us and we work with teachers. We have stuff that teachers can use. And whenever teachers start to use it, you think about all those teachers that you worked with. Each one of those teachers represents dozens of kids, at least dozens of kids. And so if that idea spreads out to the teachers and if they use it in their classroom, now all of a sudden we're impacting hundreds of kids, depending on the size of your reach in your school district, maybe that's thousands of kids. And if that impacts their learning, now we're creating all of these little citizens that go out into the world that start to impact the community and that ripple effect gets even bigger. And if you start to scale all of that back, you realize that that community impact, which eventually becomes world impact, all starts to happen on the community level because that happened to the kids because it happened with the teachers because you planned something helpful that was gonna impact those kids. And so I know I'm starting to get a little touchy-feely on you here. I know that this is not on the practical level so much, but this is just so important, I think, what we do in professional development is that we get to be the beginning of that ripple. We are a pebble in a very still, flat, quiet pond and those ripples start to reach out and they reach out to the teachers, they reach out to the kids and whenever we get to have impact on kids, oh my goodness, we are changing communities. We're changing eventually the state and the country and the world. So please don't forget that. I hope that through all of this, at least you will remember that and even if you've got some tough nuts to crack in your group, it's getting through to somebody. And so when it does get through to somebody and then it passes through them to the kids and then it gets to start changing our communities. And so it's such important work that we do. So I hope that you will remember that. So this is the stuff that comes from this blog post that I wrote. You can find it again at ditchthattextbook.com slash powerfulpd. So you can go check out all 27 of them. I don't think we got, we got to what? Two, four, six, eight, 10, maybe a dozen of them or something. So there's a bunch of other stuff there. Some of it will probably be more useful to you than others but hopefully there's some nuggets there that could help. I kind of hate the fact that you guys are all just listening to me because I know that we've got dozens on the live call and we will have even more than that that are watching the video afterwards that could share their own stuff. And so I hope that even if you don't get a chance to share it on a video like this that you'll share it through whatever communities you have because your perspective is important too. And you've got things to share also. I did want to mention this one last thing. I have a great free resource that you might want to check out. It's called, it's a free ebook called 101 Practical Ways to Ditch That Textbook. I'm always looking for ways to bring in technology, creativity, innovation, stuff like that into the classroom. This ebook has 101 practical things that you or the teachers you serve could plug in your classes right away. There's another free ebook that goes with it. And so if you go to that link, ditch that textbook.com slash 101. If you go there, you can get that free ebook, actually those free ebooks delivered right into your inbox and what it will also do is it'll sign you up for my email newsletter where I'm sharing practical things to help teachers out in their instruction to be able to do cool things in the classroom. Just new ideas every single week. And I know lots of tech integration specialists have told me this is the kind of thing that they like to be able to either forward onto their teachers or to pull little snippets out of the email newsletter or to pull blog posts so that they can share them with their teachers. So if you're looking for great content that you can pass along to the teachers that you serve, then I would be honored if you would check it out. And if you found stuff that you wanted to pass along that would be great. So hope this has been useful. It's been fun to be able to share a couple of ideas with you. And so I'm so thankful that Angela that you invited me to come in. Oh yeah, it's been great. So I'm gonna show a couple of slides here but all of you that are live, I really want you to think about what do you wanna ask Matt? What do you wanna pick his brain about since we have about 10 minutes to go. Feel free to type in the question box. What would you like to ask him? What would you like him to elaborate on? Share a story about, go ahead and type that in and I will pass that on to him. Of course, what do you add to your meatloaf too? Remember I wanted to know. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Joni already said tomato paste breadcrumbs and I forgot Joni what your third one was. But there have been some chatter about that. But as a reminder, we do offer free professional development for teachers in our PD and PJs program. So make sure if you haven't ever joined us for that opportunity to do so. And as Matt was just sharing, how can you share your ideas within a community? This is a great spot to go to our CISA tech integrationist group on Facebook. You don't have to use CISA to be there if you're a tech integrationist or even know other tech integrationists. This is a really great place where people are asking questions, they're sharing successes, they're bouncing ideas off of each other. So this would be a great spot to share as well. And if you're not yet connected with our CISA community, you have all sorts of spaces for that from Twitter to Instagram to Facebook. And of course our help center is at help.cisa.me. So we are gonna jump into some questions here live. I'm actually just gonna go back to Matt's intro slide here to kind of rest on that. Maybe that's weird because you're right next to your picture, your live video is right next to that, but we'll go with it, right? Maybe I'll rest on here or so if they're looking for the link to the full blog post about these PD tips, I highly encourage you to check that out. So one of the things that I was thinking as you were talking and sharing that was really, I almost feel like this is one of those sessions that you could have on a playlist as you're planning a PD and just take a quick listen and try to maybe integrate one or two ideas if you're going into a session and think about how you can even focus on that aspect. I think this would be a good one to kind of keep revisiting and just rejuvenate yourself every now and then as well. So I'm gonna jump, I'm gonna look at some questions coming in. Let's see, Hope says really you should be asking about what everyone puts in their sauce. The sauce is most important, says Hope. Hope is exactly right on that. The sauce on the top of the meatloaf is key. I'm so glad you brought that up. That is solid point. Oh, so Joanie has a question, Matt. She's wondering if you're doing the ditch summit this year. Oh, Joanie! Maybe talk about that a little bit for those people that are live that have never heard about that. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Absolutely, thank you so much for asking about that. Yes, I'm doing the ditch summit again. So let me give you the rundown on this real quick because this may be something you wanna share with the teachers that you serve. It is a free online conference for teachers. And so what I do is it starts, in fact, I'll give you exact dates even though those haven't been announced yet. Look at me looking for my notebooks because I still do things in paper notebooks sometimes. If that makes any of you feel a little bit better that I'm kind of like analog and digital. It is gonna start on December 21st and it'll run through January 8th. Very intentionally during the winter break time. And so what we do is we've got video presentations from all of these amazing speakers. It's a lot of the authors that you've read, the people that you've bumped into on Twitter. We've got national board certified teachers. We've got former teachers of the year. We've got national teachers of the year. I mean, just all of these cool folks from previous presentations and then we'll have nine brand new ones. A lot of the videos are 45 minutes plus or minus 15. And I just interview people about, we'll get somebody on and talk to them about a topic that they're kind of an expert on and we'll pull out all of these practical nuggets that you can start using right away. So from the 21st to the 8th those videos are available. We'll have nine brand new ones, probably more than 50 altogether that you can watch. And the best part about it is that when you watch one of these videos, once you're done, you can generate a certificate of completion for professional development credit. So each one of those videos counts for one hour of professional development credit if your school or district accepts it. So I know lots and lots of teachers like to go to this because they can get that professional development credit for free. If you go to ditchsummit.com, ditchsummit.com, there's a place where you can sign up to get an email reminder when it starts and to get emails during the summit so that you can go get the videos. So you can go sign up for that. Feel free to pass any of that information on the website along to the teachers that you serve to. Awesome, love that Matt. So Colleen is just thanking you. This was amazing. She loved your pebble in a quiet pond reference. A couple of other questions coming in. Joni is wondering Matt, if you can talk a little bit about what's the best approach for differentiating in tech PD. So you have some teachers that might be in a session with really high ability and really low ability. Yep, yep. I think that's a great point. I think for me, what I like to do a lot of times, there's a couple of different ways to do this. One comes down to that personalized type thing where if we know ahead of time, if we can ask them questions about their skills. Now, sometimes that's tough because it's hard for people to self report their skills or sometimes people will undervalue themselves or overvalue themselves a little bit. But if we ask that, sometimes that's kind of useful. But what I also like to do is I like to start if I'm in different segments of my professional development, especially if I've got everybody as a whole group, I like to start with my beginner stuff at the beginning of a segment. So I'll give you an example. I talk about Google Maps Street View during my workshop sometimes, where you can drop the little yellow pegman down and you can see the world in three dimensions. So what I like to do is I like to give the basic stuff to everybody at the beginning because that way your sort of your lower techie people get something easy that they can go do that's a quick win. And while they're working on that, then sometimes I'll say, what you can also do is this and then I start to build a little bit more. And then if you really want something nerdy and see when I'm talking about something nerdy, really the only people that are hearing me are the ones who are looking for something nerdy because the other ones are still focused on their computers trying to figure out how to drop the little yellow pegman. So you see, I think if you scaffold it that way we restart with something kind of basic and then you go to the next level while those folks are still thinking about the basic part and then you go to the next level for while these guys are all still, you gotta think about, I think, where is their head space? The beginners, their head space is just on doing that basic stuff you showed them at the beginning. But the advanced ones are like, I got this. So that's why when you continue to go up like that then I think you're providing just what their head space needs to be able to add something new. I hope that was helpful. Yeah, that was great. We have a couple more questions we're gonna squeeze in. So Jeff is asking what do you do when admin puts tech on the back burner? Oh yeah, the admin question. That's a great question. Cause I think that comes in a couple of different versions. If they're putting it on the back burner as far as hardware and infrastructure there's like not a lot that we can do with that. That's hard. I mean, that becomes changing minds of leadership. And I think that when we have a vision for what we can do with technology, instead of just saying, hey, we need to get Chromebooks. We need to get iPads. We need to get something. It's like, what can we do with it? And they start to see that. Maybe that's where that changes. As far as like when admin isn't pushing tech integration as much. I think that's our opportunity to get granular to get individual with it. Sometimes when we don't get everybody together in the same room, maybe what we can do is we can get to one. I like to go to like the tech superstars or maybe even better than the tech superstars, the teaching superstars, you know, the ones who have really effective instruction and try to help them solve a problem or help them to improve on something. And whenever one person gets it, it's like then you start to get a grassroots thing. So even if you can't get it from the top down, sometimes you can start things out on the grassroots level and the teachers will spread it instead of the admin. Great ideas. We have about 30 seconds. So we have a couple of quick questions. Leslie wants to know if you're gonna be at FETC this year. Yes, I will, I'll just be here there. Awesome, yeah, she'll see you there. And just a shout out to Amos who is here from Ghana with Nayan. So thanks for making time to visit us here live today. We love it, we love it. And a special thank you to Matt for being here and sharing all of your ideas and inspiration. We hope you'll all join us next time for another session in about a month. So we encourage you in the meantime to hop into our Facebook group and share ideas and ask questions with other tech integrationists or coaches or admins that are doing a lot of the same stuff that you are doing. So Matt, thank you so much for joining us today. My pleasure, thanks so much.