NCED Connect Symposium 2025

Ready to take your district’s professional learning on AI from small beginnings to transformative impact? In this session, we’ll explore practical strategies to scale AI-focused training and support across schools. Learn how to create sustainable programs, foster educator buy-in, and ensure equity in access to AI learning opportunities. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to expand your reach, this session will provide actionable ideas to help your district take big leaps toward empowering teachers and students with AI tools and knowledge.

Setoff on an adventure into the Kingdom of Boyd. King Boyd will share with you the way to gamify your classroom for a learning experience like no other. Attendees will be introduced to a classroom setting that allows students to grow and thrive in a way that encourages them to use their strengths to apply their learning. Gamification begins with the terminology, theming your classroom and decorating. I will share how my class takes on a medieval theme as the students enter the castle of a king and work their way up the social hierarchy of the Middle Ages. We will also look at ways that you could theme your classroom in other subjects. Adventurers who join will go on Quests, complete Challenges, & Boss Battles all while leveling up as if they were playing a Role Playing Game. Quests consist of choices to create and apply their learning in a variety of ways such as decorating phone cases and Stanley cups, creating Newspapers, Magazine Covers, Social Media Pages and many more activities to choose from. They do these activities with things relevant to the content they are learning in a digital format. Participants will walk through a week in the classroom and be active participants in the session. They will have an opportunity to explore digital tools like ChatGPT and Brisk teaching to help enhance any lesson and create products that they can take back to their classroom to use. Participants will walk away with a packet of resources to implement in their own learning spaces.

Come hear how Moore County School teachers use data to improve student outcomes.  We will share our data dive protocol for Learners, AKA The L Protocol.  The goal is to use various data points to identify students with the most potential of movement.  Teachers can easily idenify the students who are struggling the most, but it's easy for the kids in the middle to fall through the cracks.  Our L Protocol identifies areas of focus for individual students using EOG, mClas, iReady, Check-In, and more in a quick protocol.

In this session, we will discuss how scaffolding the use of a digital tool like Canva can benefit students in terms of products created and enhance learning experiences in the classroom. We would all agree that the more we use a tool, the more comfortable we are with it, and the better the products we produce. Do we approach student products the same way?This session will provide practical strategies and examples to effectively integrate Canva into your teaching practice and easy ways to connect activities, building on the understanding of Canva as a tool leading to a higher level of creativity, more in-depth projects, and ultimately better products, refocusing on the learning and not the challenge of learning a new tool all the time.Participants will discuss how we scaffold learning content and how we apply this concept to tools in the classroom or if we even do. Then, we will walk through a sample yearly curriculum showcasing ways Canva could be tactfully applied and how the scaffolding concept would work. Lastly, participants will get a chance to share ways they have used Canva in the classroom and if they used the scaffolding concept or if scaffolding the use of the tool would have changed student outcomes.