If you can go next year, you should. Lehn organized this year's trip and it was amazing.
The facilities were nice, the food was almost as good as Gus', but most importantly the speakers were really good, especially the Keynote speakers who were national renowned.
Their web site is: http://blogs.ksbe.edu/edtechconference
The theme was Web 2.0, which is what some people are calling the transition of the web from just a place you can read information from, to a place where you can read AND write information to build connectivity between users.
################################################################
The first General Session Speaker was Will Richardson (http://weblogg-ed.com/).
He has a great blog/website you should check out at weblogg-ed.com.
He also has another page you might want to check out:
http://willrichardson.wikispaces.com/
I'm sure it's alot of the stuff you already heard, but here goes anyway.....
He basically talked about how teachers can(and should) use emerging technologies to 1) Connect with their students and 2) to get their students more involved in the learning process. He thinks we really need to show them how to learn and find information and not just memorize facts for memorization sake. If students are vested in the learning process they will learn more....sort of along the lines of the book Lou gave us to read, "Mindsets".
He talked about the students taking ownership in what they were learning. He talked about teachers using technology to stay more connected with students and generating interest in their students.
He gave a lot of web sites, but here are a few I think you'll find of interest:
* http://www.ted.com - this is the site for the videos that Joe showed during one of the leap days. A lot of educators or people talking about education. Some good videos to watch.
* http://www.fanfiction.net/ - this is a site for writers. Basically people write stories to add books or chapters to their favorite stories. If you look at http://www.fanfiction.net/book/Odyssey/ , it is basically a bunch of related stories based off of the Odyssey and a good majority of students who posted their work for a class project. It gets the students published and the theory is they'll do a better job because their peers can read and review it (from around the world and not just from their class).
* http://ocw.mit.edu - this web site is free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT, taken from courses that they have offered. So you can 'take' a course at MIT that the lectures and notes are on-line for or you can get ideas for your class also. There is over 1800 courses online.
################################################################
The first breakout session I attended was called Personal Learning Networks, by David Warlick. Despite technical difficulties with the internet, the talk was good.
His website is DavidWarlick.com
A Personal Learning Environment is your connections to help you learn how to better do your job, and increase your understanding of how use technology to make you more effective. It dealt with ways to stay connected with people in your field to increase your knowledge.
To learn more about this session click below for his:
- Outline notes
- Personal Learning Network Strategies
He also talked about social networking and there is a good wikispace page just for teachers on the topic: http://socialnetworking4teachers.wikispaces.com/
Here are some web videos by Will Richardson on Personal Learning Networks: http://www.plpnetwork.com/videos.html
Here is a video web stream of a later Session of Personal Learning Networks by David, and put live online by Will Richardson.
Live Video streamed by Ustream
Broadcast powered by Ustream.TV
###############################################################
Next session: Sprout Builder Widgets
This is a local company that started out as a web site to collect on-line donations. They realized the schools and non-profits they worked with were missing tools to build a creative and fun interface. They decided to build their own product and started another business just for this program they call SproutBuilder. It is currently a free program.
It is a web site that you can use to build flash content for your class web page. It is hosted on their web site. You can do videos, quizes, polls, etc. It is a pretty neat tool, and I'll probably teach it for a week or two in my Computer Graphics class as well as Beginning Programming class.
View their presentation (as flash content from their web site):
http://sproutbuilder.com/blog/2008/06/08/edtechconference
It has 'clickable' links in it.
###############################################################
Next Session: Social Media Survival Guide
This presentation was about a bunch of various web sites and their uses. I'm working my way through the list and will share any good ideas with you, such as the jott.com web site I already talked about.
Here is their slideshow:
###############################################################
Next Session: General Session 2 - David Warlick
http://landmark-project.com/
Here is the video of the second morning General session:
Video clips hosted by Ustream
###############################################################
No comments:
Post a Comment