Highlights of the Christa McAuliff Conference

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

A convenient use of Google

When you run into any kind of error message, and I mean, any kind, first "google it." Most likely, google will direct you to a number of message boards where people dealt with this specific issue and found out the fix. I can't tell how many issues I've solved this way, both at work and at home. If your computer has a recurrent issue but no error message, google a description, or several ones using different key words, of this problem. For instance, "windows live photo gallery installed but not opening", or "windows livephotogallery problem" etc. Jude

25 Tools every Learning Professional should have -Free

In 2008 223 learning professionals worldwide contributed their Top 10 Tools for Learning. From this, the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies compiled the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008 list. These tools are the most popular free tools in 25 tool categories. They are a mix of personal productivity tools (for managing personal learning) as well as authoring tools (for creating learning solutions). Many of them are Web 2.0 tools that promote a social, collaborative, sharing approach to learning. Jude

Printable Computer Quick Reference

This free gift from K12.Customguide.com consists of downloadable reference sheets for many different softwares used by teachers. Scroll down their homepage to see the whole list. Enjoy. Jude

Teachers love Twitter

From the NHOET Blog- While some educators are just getting familiar with the term Web 2.0 and all the various tools that can be classified as “web 2.0 tools,” other educators are already immersed in using them. Of course everyone has their favorites. My current favorite is GoogleDocs, but that’s a topic for another post. Today I thought I should share a few interesting articles about how Twitter (one of those Web 2.0 tools) can be used for language arts, community building, and many other things.
Search Engine Watch has an article by Ron Jones about Twitter
David Parry has a blog called academHack with a lengthy interesting post about how he uses Twitter in his university classroom at U Texas in Dallas.
EdWeek’s Digital Directions June 2008 issue includes an article about Twitter. One of my favorites was how this teacher used it:
created a Twitter account called Many Voices and invited his students, and students around the world, to add a sentence or two to the ongoing story through tweets. Within six weeks, the rolling story, written 140 characters at a time, was finished—with the help of more than 100 students in six different countries.
Have you used Twitter? Cathy Higgins

New website for online learning resources for everyone

From the NHOET blog-This morning, Governor Lynch was joined by state education officials in unveiling a new Web site that will serve as a one-stop, online learning resource for students, parents, teachers and school administrators. The new Web site provides information about online learning course work available — at schools in NH and beyond — which can be counted toward high school graduation credit. The comprehensive site also presents information and studies regarding the benefits of online learning. More…

Green curriculum

GreenHearted.org is a primer on transformative education for sustainability ...what you'll need in order to green your classroom, your curriculum, your students' learning, your school community, and your life's work as a teacher. Definitely inspiring. Jude