This weekend, I am attending and presenting at the EdTech Team’s Los Angeles County Summit.  That’s right – I’m not just attending, but also presenting.  It is completely out of my comfort zone to present outside of my own district, but it is something that I have been wanting to do since I attended our local summit back in September.

So, here I am.  Outside of my district.  Getting ready to present.

Surprisingly, I am not as nervous as I thought I would be.  I decided that my first presentation at a summit needed to be something that I felt confident in talking about to a group of educators.  It also needed to be something where the teachers could interact with the topic and other educators during the presentation.  Mostly, I wanted my presentation to resemble how I teach my students in my own classroom, which is tends to be very open and interactive with little direct teaching.  It’s more about exploring and interacting with the material, rather than hearing me talk about it.

Therefore, I decided that my first presentation (out of my district) would be on gamifying the classroom through BreakoutEdu Digital.  I’ve been using BreakoutEdu Digital in my classroom for the last few months. I’ve designed and built several BreakoutEdu Digital activities and my students love it.   It is such an amazing way to engage the students in learning and reviewing the content or applying their knowledge in different ways.  Therefore, I knew that I was comfortable with this presentation and it would be something that would engage adults.

Here is my presentation:

My presentation is tomorrow morning and I am excited/nervous.  Even if it isn’t perfect, I am glad that I pushed myself to go out of my comfort zone and to present at this conference.  Personally, I feel that if I don’t continue to push myself, I won’t continue to grow.  And, quite frankly, I’m much less concerned about being uncomfortable and more concerned about ever losing the desire to grow and learn.

Wish me luck…!

This is a part of a set of blog posts from the Transparency: Real Stories from a Real Classroom series.