>> Hello everyone, I'm Anthony Salcito.
And I'm really excited to welcome you
to our fourth Hack the Classroom,
coming to you live from
the Microsoft Studios in Redmond Washington.
We have a studio audience filled with educators.
Let's give them a shout.
Awesome. These guys are from nearby schools
here in Washington.
And I'm really excited to have you join us today.
We also are joined by
another live audience in
Roxbury Innovation Center in Boston Massachusetts.
Let me give a shout out to the folks in Boston.
Hello Boston.
Good to see you.
All right. And that's
a preview of our upcoming keynote speaker
will get it started today.
Before we get started, I'm really thrilled.
We have a global audience for
Hack the Classroom and I'm thrilled to share
with you one of our newest Microsoft tools,
Microsoft Translator.
As educators, you often have to
work with many types of learners,
including, students who are deaf or hard of hearing.
And these require assistive technologies
for language learners also
who may not speak or understand
the language of your classroom well.
A diverse student body includes family members too
who may not share the language
with teachers or school staff,
making school enrollment, teacher/parent conferences,
and conversations with school staff a challenge.
Microsoft Translator helps bridge
all of these communication gaps,
supporting accessible classroom
learning with live captioning,
cross language understanding, and
even multilingual casual conversation
support to help students.
Today, we are going to launch
a room that you can join to see
a live transcription of everything we'll
talk about today in
your own native language. Take a look.
Now, one of the things about Microsoft Translator,
there's actually an add in to PowerPoint.
So for teachers out there,
you can use Translator everyday within
your class to translate into a number of languages.
This is great because students of your classroom can have
assistive technology even if
there are English language learners,
or second language learners,
or languages that not the of a native language.
Now what I've got here is the Hack the Classroom screen.
Now, this is the broadcast screen.
What you're going to want to do,
if you're going to be using the Translator functionality,
is snap this to the left hand side of your screen.
I've got my Translator window here.
And this is essentially the UI
that you got on the Translator tool.
I have my conversation code.
This is what you're going to need to enter
the room to join the conversation.
You can obviously enter your name,
and then choose the language you like
the translation to see from.
And you've got a number of languages to choose from.
Even Klingon for those Star Trek fans out there.
And certainly, once you've got your language selected,
you'll click it and enter the room
and join the conversation.
Hopefully, this is going to bring us together.
Help us connect a global platform to Hack the Classroom.
Where do you get some great ideas from this.
And we welcome your feedback on how you're
using this tool within your classroom.
>> So, please take advantage of that.
I'm really excited to join the global audience
now with Hack the Classroom event.
Now, our theme for today is
sparking creativity and curiosity.
It's an amazing theme.
I'm really excited about the
sessions you're going to hear.
And you're going to see how teachers from
around the world are
really making the impossible seem
not only really possible,
but really amazing for classrooms.
I'm inspired by the creativity,
and the leadership, and energy, innovation,
these educators bring not only to their classroom,
but to the world of education every single day.
They're using technology in innovative ways,
but certainly amazing teaching practices as well.
So, one of the things I want to shout
out as we go through this is
really find ways to inspire all of you.
These educators inspire me,
they inspire all of us at Microsoft,
and hopefully many of you watching can be inspired by
a best practice or an activity that you see today.
And we want you to know,
once you're inspired, to make
sure to leverage the resources,
because we're going to provide a lot of resources in
the URL to make sure that you get access to the tools,
that you can start making these things
real in your classroom.
As part of the event today, we asked some of
our Microsoft innovative educator experts from around
the world to share short videos of how they've been
using technology to hack learning in their world.
We have a series of six
educator-created presentations to share with you today.
And I'm really, excited about these videos.
They are awesome.
And our first one comes from
Bisera Ristikj from Macedonia.
She teaches early elementary students,
and is hacking her classroom by updating parents,
really including parents in
a dynamic work environment to get a look at
what students are doing. Let's take a look from Bisera.
>> Building a teacher/parent relationship
has never been easier.
The following slides represent an example
of how we do this by teaching.
My teaching involves a lot of recognition activities.
And most of the students
perform in OneNote on the SMART Board.
>> A mouse.
>> As a teacher,
I want to keep parents informed
about their children performance in class.
By clicking on Send To Sway,
I create a rich format newsletter,
and send them away with one click,
or I can send this section to my personal blog.
In this way, teachers save time.
Students create with fun,
and parents stay up to date.
>> Awesome. Thank you so much Bisera.
But Hack the Classroom isn't
just about sharing stories with you.
We're going to ask you do some work here,
and we want this to be a rich
professional development opportunity today.
And we've partnered with Flipgrid
to create a place where all of
you can create and
share with you what you've learned today,
and reflections on what you've seen
and really want to take advantage of in your classroom.
Now, Flipgrid is an amazing tool used by
teachers around the world with students every day,
to reflect using audio video and more.
Please look now at the discussions.
We want to encourage you to answer with
short videos following today's webcast.
You can answer one, two,
all three of these questions.
Our first question is, what is
the one thing you've learned today
watching from our webcast in
Hack the Classroom that inspired you?
And next, I would love to know,
what is the one thing in
the next couple of weeks that you're going to
leverage and use in your classroom
based on what you saw today?
And then finally, I'd love to get
some feedback on the Microsoft educator community,
and sharing one of the courses that
you find helpful and useful in your classroom.
So really love to see,
and I'm excited to get all these Flipgrid videos,
and we've got a couple of them started from
educators who had a preview
of some of the conversations today.
Now, how you shared your learnings with us,
and really with the world is what's going to help us
start a rich conversation
amongst all of us watching today.
And I look forward to learning and connecting with you.
Before I move on,
I want to make sure that we also
connect to the shout outs
that are happening around the world.
I know we've got a lot of great audiences happening.
Please make sure a #microsoftEDU,
share where you are,
share your energy, share photos,
I'd love to give you shout outs and I'll be doing that
in a couple of breaks upcoming.