I'm at a conference

NECC 09 Day 3

2009-07-01T04:53:00.000-07:00

Tuesday opened up with a debate, "Brick and Mortar Schools are Detrimental to the Future of Education". The highlight of the debate was that it was hosted by Robert Siegel, of NPR. My problem with the debate was the use of the term detrimental. Are brick and mortar schools becoming obsolete? Possibly. Are they hurting our students. No.

I followed that up by going to a presentation about Web 2.0 tools for pint sized students. I saw a few good things and will compile them into one wiki later.

Kathyschrock.net/score is a a copy of the next presentation I saw. Great information and helpful. The youtube video about the iphone's value was also very interesting. I am a iphone lover who has no iphone so it was preaching to the choir.

glovely09.wetpaint.com is a copy of the next presentation. Some repeats off the earlier web 2.0 tools but reinforced much of what I have heard.

After that I wandered around the exhibitors hall. May of the exhibitors were running low on freebies but I entered a few drawings. I won't win anything but there is thrill in it anyway.

I need to get back and summarize these tools into one place. I will get them together and put them in one post over the next few weeks.

Summary on Monday June 29 at NECC

2009-06-30T04:31:00.000-07:00

First session I attended was the "10 best free web 2.0 tools" session I was tweeting about. Some neat stuff and probably the session I have reflected most on. I see several applications for these in an elementary school setting but I also wonder how realistic some of it is in the systems we set up. My guess is a good portion of the "free web 2.0 tools" are firewalled. So as much as I would like to see a class use edmondo I am unsure they could access it. I do see great applications for www.xtranormal.com and can imagine my 5 year old using it. He would need assistance with the writing but even that is possible to work around in with the right talk to text tool.

My second stop was a student session on Scratch. Scratch is a free animation/programming software available from MIT. It is similar to what Randy Pausch talked about in the last lecture when discussing Alice (which I also saw). It has a simple user friendly interface that could be picked up quickly and used for digital story telling.

After that I ate lunch. For those of you who know me, a good lunch is very important. The conference center was grossly overpriced ($3 for a can of soda) so I went walking. I found a place Phillips cafe. It is a sandwich shop with fresh meats. I got a nice roast beef wrap that was worth the walk. I will go back on Tuesday.

My Third session was called "Global Perspectives" It was three teachers who have linked their classes through the use of skype and blogs. One teacher is in New Hampshire, a second in Moosejaw Canada, and the third in Sydney Australia. The classes are 2 kindergarten level and one first grade level classes. The students have their own blog, comment on each other's work and collaborate across the net. They talked about many different things. Students use iphones in class for a variety of projects. They use flip cameras to record video. Wurdle was mentioned but no details were given. Math was described as being very hands on and manipulative based. Students practice problem solving skills with the Nintendo DS game Nintendogs. The wiki for these teachers is found at primaryconnections.wikispaces.com

Leslie fisher was next. She discussed gadgets and websites, very little of this one was educational based. Most interesting may have been Trillian, which is a chat consolidator. It takes all your chat applications and runs them through one interface. The other sites mentioned were tripit, yelp, jott, remember the milk, evernote, ustream, mozy, despair and smugmug.

The last talk was Westley Field of Skoollaborate. He talked about schools without walls and the potential of second life. He had some interesting ideas on the potential direction things were going. he showed some videos on emerging technologies and the ways business was changing. He showed us Sony's flexible paper TV screen. We discussed marketing tools like customer developed content in this Doritos ad. The ad was made as part of a contest and the award was a couple thousand dollars. Developed by customers, spread through sites like you tube and the marketing budget can cut or directed elsewhere.

We then looked at the educational implications of this. One quote he put forward was "21st century skills will make content obsolete." The idea behind it being our students have access to more information and through so many means that they can find what they need. We need to teach them to think critically, problem solve and judge situations.

He ended much where I began in discussing firewalls. His quote on this was an old saying,"The best fruit is on the farthest branch." There is risk going for it but it is worth it in the long run and even failure is a learning opportunity. The other comparison he had was to sports where kids get hurt all the time. We don't stop them from playing sports in the future, we encourage it.

On to today. The first session starts in a moment as the keynote speaker Robert Siegal of NPR talks about schools without walls.

2009-06-29T13:32:00.000-07:00

Tons to write about, no time now or access later. I will be on at some point with links and information. I tweeted most of the morning until my ipod battery dies. I am at the laptop station at this point but need to move quick.

check out the morning tweets by following Skepticallookc

day 1 and 2

2009-06-29T04:32:00.000-07:00

Sunday evening we arrived and came over to the conference center to get our registration information and hear Malcolm Gladwell talk. His talk was informative and reinforced much of what he spoke wrote about in outliers. He focused on the band Fleetwood Mac as the main example of many of his ideas.

One topic he focused on was the idea of intelligence as force of success and pointing out that the smartest are not always the best. The idea itself is a good one but his example was to cite Wonderlick scores of NFL quarterbacks. My problem is he selectively chose which players scores he needed to use to demonstrate his point, Teri Bradshaw, Donovan McNabb, Dan Marino being 3 of the7 low score examples. The best of his high examples was Eli Manning. This hurt the credibility a bit in my eyes.

Today I am starting by going to a talk about free web 2.0 tools. The 8:30-9:30 sessions are the best variety and I identified about 10 worth seeing. 10:00 is a little sparser and I think I may see a student showcase on the use of Scratch, a programing application for elementary students....I think.

11:oo is looking like a talk on challenging students in a digital age or a talk on data usage, thrilling. 12:30 is going to be about global connections.

2:00 is shaping up as the highlight of the day. Gadgets..not gidget but Gadgets. I am going to end the day with a 3:30 talk about emerging technologies and their implications on learning. The last two will be interesting.

NECC

2009-06-25T12:33:00.000-07:00

I'm going to NECC next week and wanted to document the conference in a way that is appropriate to the conference itself, through technology. As the conference is taking place I will be adding information and commenting on what I am seeing.