Our Bold ISTE 2019 Experience

Earlier this week, Learning Without Tears traveled to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to support educator professionals in pursuit of resources designed to help them activate bold changes in their classrooms. We joined a group of over 16,000 educators on a professional development assignment they will never forget. Here’s a brief recap of our International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Conference experience.

After an exciting opening day full of opportunities to network and access unique open learning spaces and customized conference paths, attendees were ready for their first full conference day. For us, that meant finally getting to share how we can work together with educators to inspire students through digital instruction.

Educators who visited our booth were welcomed into an interactive, digital learning zone and given the chance to test their typing speed and skills by participating in our Are You Faster than a 5th Grader? challenge. Visitors tried their hand at an educational game of keyboarding and learned their Words Per Minute (WPM) score with our  Keyboarding Without Tears curriculum—and learned whether they were faster at typing than a fifth grader.

The players with the highest Words Per Minute averages won special prizes! But, everyone taking on the challenge to bring bold, new teaching strategies and technologies into the classroom is a winner in our eyes, so everyone who came to visit us left with a special Learning Without Tears chocolate bar, a laptop camera cover, and other fun supplies. Challengers could also take a photo with a Keyboarding Without Tears frame to remember their immersive digital learning experience.

We wanted every educator to leave knowing how they can give their students the tools they need to develop computer literacy and digital citizenship for future computer-based assignments and tests in a fun way. Through our ISTE experience, we were able to do just that.

If you would like to learn more about how to bring Keyboarding Without Tears to your classroom, visit our website. We hope to see you again next year at ISTE 2020!

By Monet Stevens Monet A. Stevens is a graduate student at Georgetown University. She has interned with several organizations across the Greater Baltimore and Washington D.C. Metropolitan area including the Smithsonian and the Surety and Fidelity Association of America. Monet is passionate about strengthening communities and empowering individuals through mass communication. She recently graduated from Towson University and moved back to her hometown near Washington, D.C. where she hopes to make a positive impact.