Well we did have a little issue getting home.  Our flight was cancelled an hour before we were to leave.

We are now driving home.  It took a little bit of work to get a refund for the tickets and luggage. We are now on the road. It is about a six hour drive.

Last picture from the conferencce.

Today was a good one at the conference. We went to a good session this morning one was to enhance  teaching religion.   One app we learned about is called flipogram.
It sounded really easy to use.

Storybird was another suggestion which is another free site.  You can create individual books, but you can not import pictures.

We finished up our day by going to the exhibit hall to hit the booths that we had not a chance to go to earlier.  Many people stopped us again and told us how much they enjoyed our session.  It was great knowing we had done a good job.

On the Road Again!!!

Thanks for visiting our blog!    Hope you enjoyed it. 

Here is the First Grade International Mural Exchange 2014.  We are very proud of our students and all their hard work! 

We hope you enjoy watching it!

It was another good day in Pittsburgh. It was freezing and windy all day. We think you had the same cold temps (36 this morning)  but that didn't stop us from hitting the ground running. We all attended some great sessions. Bill really liked a session on how boys learn. It went into depth about the difference with the brains of boys and girls.

Jeanie and I went to a session on elementary math this morning. The presenter was very high energy and jammed lots of great ideas into her session. We even came away with some manipulatives. We are both anxious to put some of her ideas to work.

Our presentation was at 2:30 this afternoon so we only went to 2 sessions in the morning.

 This is the first time we had a room and had an hour and a half to present. NCEA asked if they could record our session so they were in there. We had about 150-165 people attend!! It went well. Even with all that time, we still were pushing to get it all in, We had really nice comments from people afterwards and the evaluations showed the highest marks so we feel good about it. We had many people stop us after our session and tell us it was the best one that they attended.  All of our hard work and preparation was worth it!  We really enjoyed sharing with others at Catholic Schools from around the world.  There were teachers from  Taiwan and the Philippines 

Tonight we went to dinner with the Archdiocesan people. The Archbishop picked up dinner (even though he wasn't there). Gina Fleming, Rob Rash, Msgr Koetter, 6-7 principals and some of us little people. It was a nice and enjoyable evening.

 

We hit the ground running at NCEA. We did a quick run through of the exhibit hall. We found out that we had been featured as a session to see in Today's Catholic Teacher Magazine. We have several copies if anyone is interested in sharing in our excitement. See below :)

We connected with Heifer International at the Exhibit Hall. When we hatch our chicks this year we are going to raise money to send chicks to a country in need. 20 chicks for $25 - what a help that will be for a poor village. 

We are still thinking about how to raise the fund for this project.

We also connected with International Pen Pals. We are signed up to connect with a second grade class in Tanzania. If anyone is interested in connecting with a class in your age group, they can work with you to make it happen.

While we were in the Exhibit Hall, Jeanie and I did run into quite a famous Catholic. Nice pic, huh :)

 All three of us went to some good sessions today. Some cool things we discovered that you might want to check out were:

1. Quizlet.com - this is an easy to use site where you make index card stacks for review for your students. It is accessible from all devices with the URL code. 

2. Jeopardy Labs - another easy to use site for review where you build a jeopardy board.

3. 24/7 Science from University of California - Berkeley. It is organized by topics and is loaded.

4. Teaching Channel - It's free - online videos of teaching aides. If you sign up soon, during Teacher Appreciation Week they will be drawing for lots of gift cards, vacations and other goodies.

5. God Tube - family safe videos. They have funny, inspirational and music videos. (Like You Tube)

Bill went to a session on how boys learn differently, which he really enjoyed. He looks forward to sharing it with the faculty.  He came away with a lot of interesting data.( ie Men say 7000 words a day and women say 25,000 a day.)  Not surprising is it?

At the end of the  day, on our way out of the convention center Jeanie asked a group of nuns if we could take their picture since our kids don't get to see them. (They are everywhere here!!!)

  

 Jeanie was in the picture but she cropped herself out!

Anyway, it ended up the nun on the right saw our name tags and she used to be the principal at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel. She knew people that Jeanie knew. Small world.

I end with - Yeah PACERS!

Talk to you tomorrow.

Today was a good day in Pittsburgh. We met and started our walk to the convention center. It was about a 15 minute walk in the rain but we were all prepared with umbrellas in hand. (Be proactive!) 
We picked up our bags and then had several hours before the convention got started so we walked to the Strip District where it is very ethnic. There were shops of all sorts that were very Italian, Hispanic, Eastern European, etc.

We ate lunch at the famous Primanti Brothers Restaurant. Slaw and fries are a must on all the sandwiches. Tasty.

We then headed back to the convention center anxious for our conference to begin.

We landed

Well we made it!   It was a very interesting flight  here.  We were late leaving Cleveland and then....
We had to walk down the steps to the runway to get on our plane. 

It looked like a wind up toy plane!   We sat in the emergency exit row.   We knew we could open the door, but were a little worried that we might get chopped up with the whirling propellers .

We then took a cab to the hotel.      

 We then felt we were is a wind tunnel as the cab driver had the front  window all the way down the entire way to the hotel. It was about 30 minutes to the hotel. 
Thank goodness it was not raining and warm!

We are still smiling and  will be hitting the street early in the morning to go and check in at the conference. We are now watching the Chicago Blackhawks hockey game.  They won!

Talk to you all tomorrow. 

We are now sitting in the Cleveland airport waiting as our plane which  is delayed until 7:15

Checking out the NCEA  conference planners.
 MMMMM--- Which one will we attend.???

                                  I think we should go to the one on Wednesday at 2:30 for sure!

We are excited to be sharing our adventures in Pittsburgh at the NCEA (National Catholic Educators Association) conference with you.  We hope you have time to stop in and learn along with us.