LHRIC Tech Expo
April 27, 2012
The BOCES Lower Hudson Regional Information Center hosted a
technology expo yesterday in Briarcliff Manor. It was hosted at the
beautiful Edith Macy Conference Center. (#LHRICEXPO,
Website
Information). This full day conference
occurred on a Friday. What a great way to begin the weekend.
Feeding our #edtech brains with the nourishment to ponder new ideas,
re-evaluate current practices, and strive for a better tomorrow for
our students. Oh and did I mention as always the
Edith
Macy Conference Center provides the most
wonderful food to nourish our physical selves while the Ed Tech
discussion feeds our thoughts.
Here are some of my notes:
Keynote Session Attended:
David Warlick, 9:00 – 10:00 am
Twitter: @dwarlick
This was not my first time hearing Mr. Warlick. But each time the
experience is just amazing. What an eloquent, engaging, and
informative speaker he is.
Notes from the keynote:
We should strive to be a learner. He presented a photo of
Stonehenge and informed us that scientists and mathematicians are
attempting to recreate and calculate the sound that might have been
heard inside Stonehenge. He claimed that he did not know this the
day before he presented to us. I love this modeling of being a life
long learner.
The core of teaching should be to become a master learner.
Mr. Warlick gave us a website with links to his resources. They can
be found at
http://idave.us.
(Please becareful. I typed it incorrectly with a .com.... this is
not the correct page. Please note the .us).
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A really ingenious idea he has on his page. He uses an addon of a
Google map that plots where he has been for a presentation. What a
great day!
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We have moved from an information scarcity society to an information
abundance society
Children today have no ceiling.
Information today is networked, digital, and abundant
We live in a “culture of hyperconnectedness”.
Rather than necessarily bringing video games into the classrooms,
let's figure out what it is about video games that we can learn from
and bring that experience to the classroom setting.
Mr. Warlick demonstrated the use of Scratch. This made me wonder if
Scratch could be downloaded onto an offline computer. Then students
could create but we wouldn't have to worry about the implications of
the share button. Teachers could share by manually sharing the
created files without having the automatic public sharing.
We should be teaching digital responsibility – copyright,
appropriate use, etc
We learn from traction (the hard places). Excellent point. Makes
you think about kill and drill vs. inquiry and exploration.
Education should be a Responsive Experience
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What can we learn from Gaming? Students need goals. Students need
appropriate rules. How do our rules help us accomplish our goals?
Start small. For example with an image. Then let students question
their way into a topic.
Good education provokes conversation.
In gaming (and as it should be in education) It inspires personal
investment. Children succeed by getting it wrong! How often do we
learn from the wrong answer in the real world. We should be
preparing students for this life skill.
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According to their website, “DoodleBuzz
is a new way to read the news through an experimental interface that
allows you to create typographic maps of current news stories.”
An interesting idea. Search on a topic through the news. Draw a
doodle, line, etc. News articles will shoot off the doodle. Draw
another line from a specific line of news to see more information.
Students should be guided by safely made mistakes in order to grow
Let's make it not about what you have been taught but about what you
have taught yourself
First Session Attended:
Amy Rosenstein, 10:10 – 11:00 am
Mrs. Rosentstein is a third grade teacher in Ardsley.
She played an informative video on Skype. If this was your first
time seeing Skype it did a wonderful job highlighting the tool's
features. I have used Skype for many years. I did not know that
you could drag and drop files directly to your connected partner
through the Skype software.
Mrs. Rosenstein showed a video synopsis of her program where
students connected to individuals around the world.
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Teaching students to ask good questions is an important skill.
Questions that lead to discussion are much more conducive to
conversations online then yes or no questions are.
Someone asked if Skype sessions can be recorded. Mrs. Rosenstein
suggested Vodburner. I should try this again. I had attempted it
before but was not successful. But after listening to Mr. Warlick
remind us that we learn from getting it wrong, maybe it is time to
revisit the tool.
Second Session Attended:
Rus Healy, 11:10 – 12:00 am
Well the useful points from this session were that we need to define
the structure around beginning to think about Bring Your Own
Technology. You need to define your intended audience. Will you
begin with teachers, students, community, or any mix there of when
designing your program?
Our goals should be:
What resources do we want members of the wireless network to access?
What users should we support? And how will they be supported?
Where will we provide this access?
What control level do you need to provide?
Pleased to have had lunch with my colleagues from New Rochelle and
Adam Bellow. It was great to catch up and compare notes.
Third Session Attended:
Adam Bellow, 1:10 – 2:00 am
Twitter: @eduTecher
I have had the pleasure of knowing Adam for a few years through both
the Discovery Educator Network and ISTE Young Educators Network. It
is always great to hear him speak. I always come away with a wealth
of information and new ideas.
It's funny, as I am about to blog, I notice I begin to write my notes
as “Adam shared a soapbox link,
http://bit.ly/TechForum2012.”
Interesting how my edtech voice changes when it is a member of my
PLN. Above I wrote respectfully “Mr. Warlick gave us a website
with links to his resources”. Why am I not now beginning this
section of notes as “Mr. Bellow”? Perhaps it has to do with Adam
Bellow's kind nature. Although he has many accolades behind his
name, he never fails to greet those he knows and remembers warmly. I
feel honored that through the
DEN
and
ISTE
I have met many wonderful, highly reputable ed tech leaders. Many of
whom I am graced with the privileged to call friends. These members
of my PLN would not be addressed Mr. Dembo, Ms. Naugle, Mrs. Parisi,
Mr. Davidson, Mrs.Sheehy, Mrs. Sharoff, etc. The wonderful thing
about PLN's is that P. Yes Paula L. Naugle (my former roomie is
always special in my heart). But I mean PLN as in Personal Learning
Network. The P for personal is what makes it such a great social
learning experience.
Now please forgive me as I address Mr. Bellow as Adam in my notes:
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Love the term he used “a fremium service”. He discussed how
some tools eventually require a fee. Although I agree with the
companies an excellent tool is worth the fee. I also agree with
Adam that companies should work with educators to make the fee
reasonable. And teachers should have a plan B, C, D, E, and perhaps
F and G.
Technology evolves so should Education.
Adam played a video regarding the History of Ed Tech.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ0nlh5FU5A
It was interesting to be reminded where we came from and where are
now. It is exciting to consider where we will be?
As always, Adam's sense of humor and whit came out in his
presentation. He talked about being college (showed an image of a
set of desks) and career (showed a cubicle) ready (showed a
headstone). His presentations are not those horrid presentations of
black text on a white screen with too much information to absorb.
Adam models teaching digitally.
IEP should be for all students. Doesn't an Individualized Education
Plan sound like a universal idea?
Any teacher that can be replaced by robots should be.
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A slide mentioned several tools that I was familiar with however, I
am not familiar with
http://www.wolframalpha.com/.
Thanks Adam! I love learning about new things in passing. It
wasn't necessarily something that he was presenting on. Just
happened to appear. Digital Learning at its finest.
Edmodo is training wheels for exploring social learning. Great
analogy. I hope to borrow that for a presentation of my own that I
need to do for my superiors regarding a recent project.
You can't predict the future. We need to build it. Here here. Not
to be dripping with Discovery references but Let's
Build
It Bigger and hopefully better than it has
been. Bring on the interaction. Bring on the enjoyment from
learning. Bring on the future.
Fourth Session Attended:
Dr. Annette Lamb, 2:10 – 3:00 am
Dr. Lamb (hmm back to that respectful professional tone) covered all
the basis of the Google Search left hand navigation panel. So many
cool new features have been added. Some I have been taking
advantage of for awhile. Some were newly introduced to me by Dr.
Lamb.
It would be wise as she modeled to go over the left navigation
search panel and show students all the possibilities they have to
them.
In Google similar image search you can now drag and drop an image
from your desktop. This was a very cool feature Dr. Lamb showed. I
have used the url image and the upload app to tell Google what image
we want to find similar images of on the web. I haven't done this
via drag and drop methods yet. Very cool
Life magazine images are now available in Google Image Search.
Youtube has an educator/schools portal. Youtube for schools.
FAQ.
Blog search is available on the left navigation search panel.
Filter results from the search engine to just blogs.
Google patents – find the original primary source documents
regarding the filing for any particular patent.
Google applications – search for related applications to a search
term.
Some google skills:
Generate questions
Identify key words
Select google tools
Analyze google snippets
Identify main ideas
Connect to questions
Evaluate resources
Bubbl.us – web graphic organizers for video, audio, graphics and
text
If you search in Google by action words they will find videos
Reading Levels search by basic, intermediate, and advanced
Teach students that the url has changed after clicking on a Google
result. You are no longer in Google. Teach them to look at the url
address bar to see where they are “located”.
Analyze who created the page, why should we believe the information
Google Search stories – 7 options of searches (I have been asked
to draft a direction sheet on this. I will do so shortly).
Google now has hotel finder and flight (show time and distance of
any flight)
Google Elections
I know to Google myself to stay aware of what is written on the web.
But use Google Scholar too to see if your referenced in articles.
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Google Science Fair
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What an amazing amount of material was covered quickly.
Fifth Session Attended:
Web Tools to Make Your Classroom Rock
Adam Bellow, 3:10 – 4:00 am
Twitter: @eduTecher
A second helping of information on tools to bring to our classrooms
were showcased by Adam.
He mentioned that Educational technology should be about what the
stuff let's us do, not about the stuff.
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http://present.me Put yourself into
your presentations. Video over slideshows overlay. Really cool
tool. This was demonstrated to me at a DEN event in the fall. But
I had unfortunately forgotten about this tool. Grateful for the
reminder.
http://www.ujam.com/ Can't wait
to share this one with teachers. This tool was very new too me.
Record audio and convert to instrumentals
http://ifttt.com/ Great task created
if this then that. Set up parameters to put the web to work for
you.
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There is no finish line. Love that statement. The goal should be
lifelong learner and tools constantly change. There really is
indeed no finish line.
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What fabulous resources for everyone to explore and possibly
integrate!
What a great day of social learning and socializing! The day
concluded with a raffle giveaway. One experience that was quite
comical was when I was asked to choose one of the raffle tickets from
the bag for the numbers to be called. I quipped, “I don't want to
pull the raffle ticket. I want to have the winning raffle ticket.”
The number I happened to choose was one digit away from my own
number. Too comical for words. Thank you LHRIC for providing such
an amazing day. Thank you presenters for a wonderful learning
experience. And a very special thank you to the vendors that helped
make the day possible.
