Six workshops, including several led by classroom educators, drew many hundreds of UFT members and parents at the union’s Spring Education Conference.

Each hourlong workshop addressed aspects of pressing questions and issues in city schools right now.

At a workshop on using Apple technology to transform classroom learning, audience members gasped as trainer David Nash spoke a familiar sentence from a parent/teacher conference into an iPad and the device translated it into perfect spoken Spanish.

At It’s All About the Apps, members got a demonstration of Plickers, an online formative assessment tool that can give instant feedback to teachers in the classroom.

At a workshop on PROSE, school staffers learned how to apply to the program, which allows and encourages innovation in how schools are organized and run.

Social and emotional learning were the focus of discussion at a workshop called Creating Caring Schools, where members learned from the Positive Learning Collaborative team how to encourage a more sensitive and responsive school culture.

Teachers and staff from the UFT’s Community Learning School Initiative were on a panel that walked the audience through the steps they took to build ties with health and mental health providers and nutrition, vision and other services to support their students and families and to strengthen learning.

At the Cultivating the Power of Teacher Leaders workshop, mentor and master teachers talked about how they carefully built trust among their schools’ teaching staffs in the discussion of student work and instructional strategies.

Teacher leadership is about finding creative ways to “supply the demands” presented by educators in a school, observed Matthew Vanderlee, a model teacher at IS 220 in Brooklyn.

Each workshop offered ways for attendees to access further information and resources.