Camp Plug & Play 7.0 offers a world-class professional development experience where participants dive into one of six topics for the week. Each strand is taught by knowledgeable and patient trainers who have a strong passion for empowering teachers and students with technology.

Registration includes your own room Monday until Friday and delicious breakfasts and lunches. Most importantly, you receive practical instruction and lots of hands-on time so that you leave with new knowledge, skills, and confidence to use what you’ve learned in your classroom.

The week kicks off with an inspirational keynote presentation by Wesley Fryer, author of Playing with Media. After the keynote, participants meet in their learning strands where they will spend the rest of the week learning and creating. In addition to direct instruction and work time, Camp Plug & Play offers evening breakout sessions about popular topics.

Another evening session is Ignite Night. Campers are invited to make five-minute presentations consisting of exactly 20 slides which are shown on the screen for exactly 15 seconds each.

To make sure the technology works smoothly, the Arizona K12 Center provides a MacBook for each participant to use during the day. Although you might not be a Macintosh user, what you learn at camp will certainly be applicable to computers running Windows.

Please watch for an email from the Arizona K12 Center in the weeks leading up to Camp Plug & Play for information about the camp's online social network, your learning strand, Ignite Night, and breakout sessions.

Camp Plug & Play is a great way to spend some of your summer! This is your opportunity to join a group of Arizona educators who, like you, are passionate about engaging today's students in their learning.

GoogleTreks

Participants will use Google Maps and other Web tools to create interdisciplinary units, or GoogleTreks™, to engage, empower and motivate digital-age learners. Developed by Dr. Alice Christie, GoogleTreks incorporates text, photos, videos, and other digital data to enhance students’ problem solving, critical thinking, visual literacy, communication skills, and understanding of spatial and cultural differences. Participating in a GoogleTrek develops self-directed and collaborative learners. Creating a GoogleTrek helps learners engage in complex thinking, present and analyze data in new ways, and develop creative products about real-life communities and issues.

The GoogleTreks strand will be engaging, challenging and invigorating to participants. Expect a high-energy, inspiring experience that provides participants with a deep understanding of both the learning process and the skills to create Web-based units that enhance the learning process for K-12 students. Enabled by free Web tools, GoogleTreks allows teachers and students to synthesize information in one easy-to-use map that places text, pictures, audio files, video files, and much more in one central location.

The 2011 Horizon Report highlights six technologies that will become very important to education over the next one to five years. User-created content (such as GoogleTreks) is one of these six emerging technologies. The report further indicates that Google Maps is an application that can move ideas from the pages of a book into the imaginations of students, thus providing learning experiences with tools that students find familiar and comfortable.

This strand provides participants with:

    * numerous examples of GoogleTreks in a variety of content areas and grade levels
    * hand-outs of how to create GoogleTreks using Google Maps and a variety of other Web tools
    * hand-outs of the other Web tools used
    * a website that provides ongoing support for participants
    * a website that provides a space to publically exhibit participants’ GoogleTreks

In GoogleTreks, participants will:

    * plan a curricular unit (GoogleTrek) to engage their K-12 learners
    * create one or more curricular units (GoogleTreks) to engage their students when school resumes in August
    * share their curricular units (GoogleTreks) on Dr. Christie’s GoogleTreks Website
    * have the ability to assist K-12 students and educational colleagues in planning and creating GoogleTreks to share ideas with other learners
    * use a rubric to evaluate the effectiveness of a GoogleTrek
    * share with colleagues numerous examples of how GoogleTreks can be used in a variety of K-12 settings
    * use real-world data to encourage high order thinking skills in K-12 students
    * feel pride in producing user-created web content to become teachers who are transitioning from information consumers to information producers
    * become an educational leader who can mentor other educators as they integrate technology into their teaching and learning environments