We were so thrilled to be joined today for our Lunch w/ EdTechTeam series by Molly Schroeder, our Director of Summits. Molly is a Global Digital Age Learning Specialist, Google Certified Teacher and Google Apps for Education Certified Trainer. She presents nationally and internationally at conferences, workshops and conventions on how to integrate Google Apps and other emerging technologies into learning. Her background is in Elementary Education and she also holds a certificate in Educational Technology and Gifted Education. Find her contact information below and watch our lunch with her and read the transcript below! We hope you come to see Molly at an upcoming summit soon.
Contact Information
Email: molly@edtechteam.com
Twitter: @followmolly
Google+: +MollySchroeder
WENDY: If you have any questions or if you’re following this from Twitter or a Google+ page, please feel free to tweet @followmolly or @edtechteam or on our EdTechTeam Google+ page, we’ll monitor that if you have any questions for Miss Molly. But just a little background of Molly, here’s her Twitter. But right now, other than directing our Summits, which is a huge job, how many EdTechTeam Summits, Molly, do we have going on this year alone?
MOLLY: Well, for 2015 we’ll have over 100. So, we just added another one today in December, TBD. We can’t publicly announce it yet. So, yeah, we’re still adding Summits for 2015.
WENDY: That’s crazy. And Molly is at almost all of them, practically it feels like. She’s a road warrior and out there, but she’s also a Google certified teacher, so you might have seen her in the Google Certified Teacher Network. She’s going to be at the Moonshot EDU Summit, which I think just closed their applications, right, for Amsterdam?
MOLLY: Nope, it’s open until June 26th. So, it’s moonshotsummit.org. You can apply at the one day training at the Amsterdam Google office, and applications are pretty easy, and they are due by June 26th, and we’ll choose about 40 people to attend that with us. So the question is, if you could wave a magic wand and change something about education, what would you do? And we’re just going to try to put some big thinking around that.
WENDY: Awesome. And Molly will be there as one of the lead learners there, so of course you’re going to have a great time, but you’re also going to have an Apps for Education certified trainer. And you’re in Minnesota now, right, Molly?
MOLLY: I am. I’m in the middle of a really great summer thunderstorm here, But yeah, I’m just in Minneapolis, Minnesota. That’s where I have my home office, and I’m a frequent at the Minneapolis airport.
WENDY: And you achieved your Delta status this year, right, Molly?
MOLLY: Yeah. Yup, it’s been awesome just to kind of really have that global audience as a network of people to work with, and it’s really a lot of fun to be able to travel around and meet all the just super empowered teachers that are choosing to be at the Summits on the weekend and really empower them to go back and change their classrooms, so it’s been really fun.
WENDY: That’s awesome, Molls. And you also have...you’re my biggest travel fashion icon, and I think you have a new travel purse.
MOLLY: I do. This one, you know, bags are very important to women. This is the cute new Lulu Lemon little travel purse, and it’s a great spot for your phone, it’s got like six different pockets, and it’s just like that really good collapsible size, so I just got it, you know.
WENDY: Could it fit an Android or an iPad device?
MOLLY: An iPad mini for sure, or an Android, yeah, probably a 7 or a 9, definitely, but you’ll see it at ISTE, so keep your eye out.
WENDY: Awesome. Thanks, Moll. I learned about Molly’s fashion from Tieks, the…
MOLLY: Oh, yeah, the online…
WENDY: Collapsible ballet flat. Awesome. Thanks for giving us your fashion tips as being our Director of Summits. You’ve gotta be wearing the right stuff. But Molly, tell us, this is Lunch with EdTech Team, right? And for me it’s a little early. I’m in Portland, Oregon, everyone, and... there’s a new salad place by my place that’s a garden bar that you can just go do it yourself, and being EdTech people, we kind of like to customize everything, so those salad places are my favorite. What are you going to have for lunch, Molly?
MOLLY: I have a delicious turkey sandwich waiting for me, so yum.
WENDY: Yay!
MOLLY: It’s very exciting, very exciting lunch today.
WENDY: Well, tell us, what’s your next Summit that you’re going to be at?
MOLLY: So, next week I am gearing up to lead the Illinois Summit which is in Homer Glen, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, and we just sold out with 500 people attending, which is really exciting, and I’ll be leading that with one of our other EdTech team featured speakers, Kate Petty. So, we’re going to be at Illinois Summit, and we’ve got an awesome program of people and a lot of featured speakers that are joining us.
And then in two weeks I’m going to be out in Colorado. We just finished the Breckenridge Summit. We’ll have another Summit in Boulder in October, but I’m going to do a little custom PD with a school district in Steamboat Springs. So, EdTechTeam not only puts on Summits, but you can hire us to come to your school and do custom PD for whatever you want us to do, so you let us know the theme of the day, and we’ll make ourselves available to do sessions and keynotes and all that stuff available for you too.
WENDY: Awesome. And I’m looking just right now at the schedule for Illinois just for folks to know what does Molly like to present on, and I know my favorite sessions from yours are always your Chrome apps and extensions, and I also really enjoy some of the Sites stuff you’ve done, but it looks like in Illinois you’ll be doing Google Classroom and Personalizing Chrome for Learning on a Chromebook or a Laptop.
What’s your favorite session that you like to do and what can folks expect to see from you?
MOLLY: Well, I just did a session in Breckenridge, a brand-new session, called Assessment in the Digital Age. Probably one of my least favorite parts of teaching was doing the assessment part, but it’s so important, and if you start thinking about if kids are learning, that’s what you’re in charge of: figuring out if they have or not.
So, I’m loving a new extension and website called docent.edu for that, and that’s a Google Apps extension. It’s actually a cool startup company by two teachers here in Minnesota, and it allows you to customize any webpage with discussions and questions, so that’s really cool, and add sticky notes and embed different things on the webpage. And then another new favorite extension in my Chrome Apps one in Google Tone, if people haven’t used it, and we were able to share our website resources using Google Tone at the Breckenridge Summit, which was really fun. So, if you haven’t seen either one of those, you should check them out for sure.
WENDY: Well, I just saw on the Twitter feed and the docent.edu won the Demo Slam at Breckenridge, I think, so that’s awesome.
MOLLY: Yeah, it did. It’s really, really impressive. So, yeah, the cool new little extension, personalize websites and kind of provide some feedback within a website.
WENDY: Where else you gonna be this year, Moll? Where else you heading on the Summit tour?
MOLLY: Well, I’ll be at ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) this month, which we are really excited about. Maybe I’ll just do a little shoutout that we are going to have a booth with Max Cases at the ISTE conference, and so we have an entire teaching leader of little 20 minute sessions of some of our most awesome featured speakers at all Summits. So, literally the EdTech Team Max Cases booth is like a Summit within an ISTE, a Summit within a conference, so we would love it for you guys to stop by, there’s going to be a photo booth, and there’s just going to be stuff going on all day long with our featured speaker. So we hope it’s a place to hang out and network as well as learn, and then, you know, visit the other guys too, Max Cases who do a lot of protective gear for your iPads and your Chromebooks and any kind of digital devices that you have in the class.
So, I’ll be at ISTE and I’ll be at the Moonshot Summit, and then in August I’m at Orange County. I’m at our Palo Alto Summits in July as well. We have two weekends in Palo Alto. These are sort of our flagship events. We have one the weekend of July 11th and 12th. Pre-Summits in between that whole week, and then another full Summit the 19th and 20th, I think, whatever the weekend is. So, really excited about those events too. If you haven’t been to one in California and Palo Alto, you’re missing out. It’s our big flagship one. It’s fun.
WENDY: I know a fun time with Molly is I know you like to do your weekly yoga. What is your favorite pose in yoga that you’re working on right now?
MOLLY: Oh my gosh. Well, I did do a headstand this morning, so I am working on that, and that is, that’s good, I know. I’m kind of thinking that I was pretty proud of myself doing that. But I’m perfecting my chipping in golf too, so those are sort of my two past times that I’m going to be working on those this summer.
WENDY: Awesome. Well, again, you can follow Molly @followmolly on Twitter, @edtechteam on Twitter as well. Go to gafesummit.com if you want to see the schedule of events that Molly is helping head up as Director of Summits for EdTech Team, and you can just share on Twitter at #gafesummit, or for our iOS Summits for iPads, which we have one in NorCal coming up soon as well, right, this July, Molly?
MOLLY: NorCal, yep, it’s going to be awesome. There’s a full three Summits. It’s going to be an awesome, awesome time.
WENDY: Awesome, and anything else that folks have to look forward to this year with EdTech Team and with Summits? Anything else to keep on the horizon?
MOLLY: Yeah, you know, I just think that our sessions are changing so much and I there’s always a fresh variety of what you’re going to learn at them, so even if you’ve been to one, I heard a stat one time that somebody said that Google changes over 150 things every year, so we just try to stay fresh and keep it fun and the networking of being together is just seriously the best part of it. It’s empowering, it’s exciting, it’s energizing and contagious, so we just love everybody who chooses to spend their weekends with us.
WENDY: Yay! And we love you, Molly. Thank you so much for joining us. Have an awesome turkey sandwich, and thanks for all of our viewers. We’ll have this up on the blog so you can watch it again and read the transcript and hopefully keep sharing with us online. Stay in touch, everybody. Have a good lunch, Moll.
Come see us next week with Michael Wacker, our Chief Learning Officer! RSVP here for the June 11th Hangout On Air at 12:00 Noon Pacific.