On december 2nd, Kevin B., Jennifer O. and Jude L. attended the Christa McAuliffe annual Conference in Nashua, which is about educational technology. Here are the highlights of this day.
David Warlick's key note speech developed his broad, infectious vision of the implications of having the classrooms filled today with “digital native” students. Digital natives live in a virtual world of continuous, global, multiple, multimedia connections. The classroom which ignores this reality will be ignored by the students and is bound to disappear. Digital hyperconnectivity offers huge educational opportunities and is changing the nature of teaching. “It's not about teaching anymore, it's about learning.” Online collaborative tools, not bound by time and space, make learning part of the global, permanent conversation in which the digital mind lives, creates and develops itself along with its unlimited networks of partners. “In this world where you never say good-bye because you are always connected, the learning experience is a ongoing conversation with other learners. It takes you from learning as a lifelong process to learning as a lifestyle.”
You may explore Warlick's vision, including clips and handouts here.
MAJOR TRENDS
Warlick's vision was illustrated, if not proven down right, by a number of workshops and presentations about the Web 2.0: Online and FREE collaborative tools like the Google for educators suite, Classroom blogs, video editing and embedding software, and podcasting, just to name a few (see list of links below). A special word about Second Life, which is literally exploding, in terms of its number of participants worldwide. It started as a social network and evolved into a parallel universe where your alter ego (avatar, in 2nd Life lingo) can do everything you do in real life (well, almost), pretty much the way you would control your alter ego in a videogame. This includes now all sorts of educational activities like field trips, scientific experiments, museum and library visits where you meet, communicate and even learn and do learning projects with partners from anywhere in the world. Wonderful, or plain scary? You'll be the judge.
As far as the classroom, two types of equipments are becoming standard features:
- individual tools: laptops, clickers (aka SIS, Student Interactive System) and tablets. Clickers' full potential is only unleashed when used with interactive whiteboards. However, they can be be already effective when used with a multimedia projector and a regular screen. To those, should be added the increasing educational utilization of nomad tools (ipods, PDAs, tablets, blackberries, without forgetting the ubiquitous cell phone).
- Environmental tools: interactive whiteboards and the various interactive presentation software that are being developped for them are definitely the stars of the show. Mimios remain a good plan B for those who can't afford interactive whiteboards, especially with a 5-year guaranty applying to the stylus, which used to be the weak point of the Mimios.
Online Administrative suites and classroom/courseware management systems are becoming a serious competition for network-based software: cheaper (some are free) and getting more and more user-friendly. See for instance Moodle and Sakai.
Assessment, surveys and GLE & NECAP testing prep (software and online) are also mushrooming, given the market created by NCLB emphasis on assessment and testing.
Assistive technology did feature a couple of breakthrough especially for the challenged reader.
All in all, a very exciting and informative day. And now, go and visit the websites for the tools mentioned above:
Interactive whiteboard and clickers: http://smarttech.com/
Testing:
http://brquiz.com/
http://scantron.com/products/
http://www.studyisland.com/
Visual presenters:
http://brquiz.com/;
http://www.ken-a-vision.com/
Assistive tech for readers: http://www.texthelp.com/
online learning (for students):
http://www.vlacs.org/
http://www.govhs.org/
Serious Games (games that boost student skills)
http://www.disti.com/SGSC/
http://www.seriousgamessource.com/item.php?story=21512
Web 2.0 applications – multimedia
ttp://globalclassrooms.wikispaces.com/first
http://animoto.com/
http://www.apture.com/
http://sakaiproject.org/portal
http://www.google.com/educators/tools.html
http://jottit.com/about
http://voicethread.com/about/
http://www.zamzar.com/
Web 2.0 applications – classroom and course management:
http://sakaiproject.org/portalhttp://jottit.com/about
http://moodle.org/
Web 2.0 – blog
http://globalclassrooms.wikispaces.com/first
web 2.0 – others:
http://www.daylife.com/home
http://www.surveymonkey.com/
http://www.secondlife.com/
Jude
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
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