Colleagues and I attended the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) organization’s National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in San Antonio, TX – home of the Alamo. More than 17,600 educators from 57 nations attended this annual conference.

(http://www.iste.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=News_and_Events&Template=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=21103)

ISTE’s Mission: Providing leadership and service to improve teaching and learning by advancing the effective use of technology in education.

NECC is the largest educational technology event in the nation, spanning five and one half football fields. It featured 1,340 booths and 479 companies displaying hardware, software, educational and technical publishing, and equipment/services emphasizing the use of technology by students and education professionals.

This was my second NECC conference. The first was three years ago when it was held in Philadelphia. Previous experience attending the conference was a big help for making the most of time spent there. The venue and session choices are vast so it’s helpful to have experience with the conference to embrace the knowledge found there.

Personally the greatest benefit to attending the conference is being with 17,000+ other educators who share similar educational beliefs, experiences and insights about the impact of technology on student learning.

There were approximately thirty one-hour concurrent sessions to choose from. With so many educators in attendance, some sessions that I wanted to see were closed out.

Sessions attended and podcasts played to date:

• Wikipedia in the Social Studies Classroom: Beyond Information Seeking

Presenter: Thomas Hammond, Lehigh University

• History Snapshots: Using Digital Photography in the Classroom

Presenter: Steven D’Agustino, Fordham University

• Student-Centered Laptop Integration into the Classroom - Panel
• Get a MUVE On: The Power of Synchronous Online Environments

Presenter: Kathy Schrock

• Funding Your Dreams: Grant Writing in the Information Age

Presenter: Sheryl Abshire

• Everyone Needs a Little T.L.C. (Technology & Literacy Classroom)

Presenter: Michelle Moore

Benefits from attending the conference:

• Obtained new technology integration ideas
• Affirmation that our tech-infused Project Based Learning approach is shared by educators around the world
• Affirmation that we are choosing the technology tools that provide our learners with experiences to help them navigate their life path into the 21^st century.
• Affirmation that allowing and inspiring tech use engages rather than enrages our students
• Motivation to keep promoting technology in education
• Collaboration and team building time with fellow staff members
• Visited the historic Alamo

Once again, one of my first conference impressions is that the 17,600 attendees can’t be generalized. They were a cross section of educators from Pre K-12 and higher learning institutions around the world. What we share is a passion for learning.

This was my first experience with Texas. The San Antonio convention center and adjacent convention hotels easily accommodated the large number of attendees. The people we met in the land of Tex Mex couldn’t have been friendlier.

I have been using Flickr for about a year now and love how it's helped me organize and distribute my own personal digital photos and videos.

I discovered today that Flickr is also building a vast collection of copyright-free photographs from around the world from a variety of well known sources including the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress. The collection is known as the Commons and it was created in January 2008.

It's a great resourced for your students to use to find high-quality, relevant, and copyright-free photos for their school projects.

Reminder to all teachers: If you are interested in obtaining a SMART Board for your classroom next year, we are offering a competitive internal SMART Board grant. SMART Boards will be awarded to two teachers in each building.

To apply, you complete the application below and submit it to Matt Hladun by Monday, June 16th.

Smart Board Grant Application

One initiative that came from our Strategic Plan is that each academic year two curriculum areas will come together (K-12) to examine ways to improve curriculum instruction. All curriculum areas meet during the course of the school year, but each year two will have the greatest attention.

This is the first year that this initiative has been put into practice. Math and Technology have been the curriculum areas of focus this year. Last night the Board of Education held a workshop session to hear from the Curriculum Renewal Committees. Both K-12 committees (Math and Technology) presented to the BOE last evening.

The Technology Committee has been lead by Matt Hladun and the Math Committee has been led by Kristine Orr. Both curriculum committees presented accomplishments to Board of Education, district and building administrators, and fellow committee members there to present and to support. Members of our K-5 Project Based Learning team:

Matt Hladun Chris Clancy Pete Hochsprung Deb Hanson Patrick DiCaprio

Kerry Devlin Stacy Stannard Leslie Carpenter Renee DeBlock Jen Heydrick

Deb Allen Kim Nichols Toni Wiekierak Amy Oleynek Kim Nichols

Wendy

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 David Warlick presented three sessions at Queensbury Union Free School District in Upstate New York.  He presented to our entire staff and again in the evening to community members.

Thank you, Dr. Howard, for bringing this forward thinking educator to our district for all of us to hear together.  Whether we teach physics, kindergarten, drive students to school on a bus or generate paychecks for staff, we all needed to hear about what motivates our community's children.

Whether we agreed or disagreed with points our speaker made, it gets us talking about what's the best way to prepare our children for adulthood in a rapidly changing world.  First, we must get their attention and Mr. Warlick tells us that technology speaks to today's learners.  In my experience as an educational technologist in this school district for five years, I completely agree.

When we classroom teachers use technology to inspire, great things happen.  This is what I see:

• Students become fully present in their learning
• They become more responsible for their learning
• They are helpful to their teacher and classmates
• They want to make sense of rather than memorize information
• They are driven to create, communicate, collaborate and celebrate (these are my goals when I teach a class)
• They want to leave a legacy of project results for their teachers to use in the future.  They want to be remembered.

Do students expect us to know technology better than they do?  No way.  That's just not possible.

Are students patient with us when we try something new even if we experience glitches or cruise through windows at a tenth of the speed that they do?  Yes, they are.

Will our students need to have skills beyond what we know today to thrive as 21st Century adults?   Yes, they will.

Will a passion for lifelong learning be essential to our students?  Yes, it will.

Are our children very different from who we were at their age?  Most definitely.

Where do we go from here? ... I'm finding fellow staff members to keep the flame of David Warlick's presentation glowing ... co-workers committed to evolving with our students.

I've had a day to digest everything that David Warlick presented on Tuesday. I got to see him speak three times that day so there was plenty to digest. In addition, I've been able to hear some of the feedback from the staff about the presentation as well.

In no particular order, here are some of my thoughts on the presentation:

• If you haven't yet seen this, David posted a story that was shared with him from one our teachers, Gwen Brilling, on his blog. It has led to some interesting discussion as well.
• Although Wendy, Chris, and I have been banging the "our students are very different than we've ever seen before" drum for about two years, it was nice to have a new voice state it (and do it so well).
• I know it seemed like David was talking all about technology and how much we it mattered to the students, I don't get the impression that he was saying it's the only thing we should be doing. Just looking at his son, you could see how proud he was of his son't accomplishments in the field of music.
• Along those lines, his point wasn't really "do more technology" but rather, "we need to help our students better shape the information they are flooded with in their lives". However, because of the world they live in, this information is increasingly in digital form, hence the technology connection.
• The most diffifult thing we need to overcome as educators is to be able to put aside our own biases on how we grew up and realize we can't compare how we grew up and how we learned to how our students today are growing up and learning. What may seem like a waste of time to us is attributed more towards our own biases.
• We can't possibly adopt all of the technologies he demonstrated. Instead, as a teacher, just try to pick one to use with your students and possibly reach them in a whole new way.
• One quote that has stuck with me: "We're not preparing our students for our future; we're preparing them for their future."
• Those involved in the chat really got a unique experience. It was new to me as well and made you appreciate how difficult it can be to multi-task (which isn't difficult for our students). That being said, that chats had some very thoughtful discussion, and I encourage all of you to read the transcript of the chats which can be found on his website.
• I know he showed an awful lot and it was a lot to process. Some comments I have heard have expressed frustration that he was going too fast to remember how to do some of these things. Please remember that his goal was to merely expose you to what is out there. If you have any interest in learning more about blogs, wikis, RSS, and so on, we have offered and will continue to offer hands-on training on these topics and would be happy to help anyone get started with this.
• Don't forget, you can view any of the information he shared by going to his online handouts.
• If you're interested in playing this summer with any of these things, here are a few links to sites he used to get you started. All of these things are free to try and very intuitive.
  • Blogs: Edublogs (create your own blog)
  • Wikis: Wikispaces (create your own wiki)
  • RSS: Bloglines, NetVibes, Pageflakes (gather RSS feeds/aggregator)
  • Second Life (virtual world)
  • Social Bookmarking: Del.icio.us (web-based bookmarks/favorites)
  • Pictures: Flickr (share pictures)
  • Tag Clouds: TagCrowd (identify key words in a text document)