Except, of course, for the afterparty — a backlog of resources to share, and connections to be made, and processes to polish so that next summer’s SuperQuests are even more timely, useful, and well-run.

We’re planning on having an informational email on the Virtual Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) for the coming academic year to be out to you in the next week or so. I’ll also do a post on the topic.

Highlights of SuperQuest 2016:

• App development may be eclipsing Game development as a topic of interest
• Advanced manufacturing (e.g., 3D printing), robotics, and programmable micro controllers (Arduino) are mainstays of SuperQuest — although their application in the classrooms and clubs continues to evolve.
• Teachers work hard at staying technologically current, differentiation, and engagement for their students and themselves.
• Educators value the time for deep discussion with colleagues — put two or more teachers next to each other, and the resources come rolling out — from binary arithmetic game to web color code applications (two instructors liked the old version better) to public-use, free images.
• Gamification of learning: passionate advocate Tisha Richmond from South Medford High School sold me on the usefulness of the Twitter searches on the hashtag #edchat and #xplap. Tisha says that 30% of Twitter users are educators (I was not able to independently verify that, because the Google search results on “education Twitter 30%” were so rich). Tisha also inspired me to buy Michael Matera’s book Explore Like a Pirate, evangelizing the use of gamification in the classroom — with implementable details. Tisha’s gamification weaves proficiency grading, collaboration, and the use of guest judges with more traditional classroom assessments in her Culinary Arts class. 
• Digital Literacy topics were big in Southern Oregon, where the Medford school district is deploying a large number of Chromebooks in the classroom this year. The use of various web tools for teachers was also a topic within the Curriculum and Pedagogy workshops in Wilsonville and Redmond.

More to come,
Respectfully submitted,
Jo Oshiro
jo@oregoncsta.org