First, thank you for putting on a great conference. This gathering of educators who are looking to embed technology into their classrooms is one of the highlights of my year. I gather many new ideas and make many great friends from the conversations that you enable me to have by assembling this massive group of people.
Secondly, thank you for providing the space for the second EduBloggerCon this year. I had gone to many NECCs in the past, but this single event provided for me more contact with people who inspire me, challenge my thinking, and have helped mentor me to become a better educator.
Thirdly, thank you for providing a large number of audio and video podcasts of sessions that I can access later. With a conference this large, it is always difficult to make choices between equally interesting sessions. Also, it gives me the benefit of sharing the ideas and thoughts with colleagues of mine who are not able to go, either because of conflicts in time or budget constraints.
Lastly, thank you for amending your policy on “amateur” recording for non-commercial use. Your swift action shows me that you are trying to be in touch with your constituent group and that you are open to change. As someone who has had to attend a few conferences throught one of the variety of new communication means, both synchronous and asynchronous methods, it does not replace the excitement of being at the conference live. What it does do is:
Create a desire to attend the conference live
Provide access to the information if personal conditions arise, if the distance to the conference, or if school and/or personal budgetary shortfalls prohibit an individuals ability to attend the conference.
I look forward to your attempts on how to make all of the sessions available to the largest number of teachers. Knowing that they can be inspired, mentored, learn, and grow in a way the meets their needs is great modeling of the techniques and the tools that you are supporting.
I am really beginning to get excited about attending NECC in San Antonio. I can hardly wait to meet several old friends and the many new friends that I have made during the past year at EduBloggerCon and at the Bloggers Cafe during the week.
I hope that the success, the hype, the anticipation, and the growth surrounding both of these events and venues from Atlanta will not exceed the reality and create a let down.
For me, however, just being able to sit around so many great people and thinkers, engaging inconversations, sharing, and planning will satisfy my thirst for learning and personal growth. I am a sponge awaiting to absorb as much as I can.
Normally on my blog, I try to focus on topics which relate to my job as a Director of Academic Technology. These include my thoughts on the larger questions that many of us face, interesting books that I have read that I feel are important, and reflecting on the day to day grind, sharing both the success and obstacles that I face working with teachers, parents, and administrators. Today, I am going to beg your indulgence while I share a personal aspect of my life.
During this academic year, I have had many personal obstacles which I have had deal with. The most significant were the health issues that my eldest daughter dealt with from August 2007 through December 2007. She was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease and I am please to share how proud I am of her that she has “survived” her sophomore year. It was a struggle for her to make up the work caused by her six week absence from school, but she finished her finals yesterday and seems to have achieved a reasonable level of academic success, hopefully maintaining a B average, while also participating in JV soccer in the spring. She downplays her achievement, but she is doing a phenomenal job of managing her illness.
The Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation (CCFA) has a fundraising walk, Taking Steps, in various cities around the country. Our high school’s community service club and I are collaborating and have set up a fundraising team, Team North Shore, for this years edition of the walk. We are participating in the walk in downtown Chicago on Saturday, June 7th on the Great Lawn just east of Soldier Field. Registration for the walk is free and be done either online or in person from 5:30 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. The 3 mile walk kicks off at 7:00 p.m. and will feature entertainment and hopefully, a wonderful evening along the Chicago Lakefront.
This is the major fundraising event for the CCFA. CCFA provides a wonderful network of resources for all of the affected by the diseases. They provide forums for those who have been diagnosed with the disease and their families so that they can become educated and share resources on new treatments and news. They provide free teleconferences for the members of their network which are informative and helpful. I have been received the same benefits from my participation in the CCFA networks for the past six months as I have from the variety of education learning networks, blogs, nings, and twitter, I have immersed myself in over the past 20 months. Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) are important elements of our lives which helps us interact with others that we may not have had access to before.
As all technology projects go, the 13 Days Project has not been without its bumps. The project is due tomorrow, Wednesday, May 28 at 10:00 a.m. This morning, we were having problems uploading the PhotoStory projects, created for playback in on a computer in .wmv format to upload into VoiceThread. Digging around the VoiceThread help (FAQs and forums), I could not find a solution.
So I turned to my del.icio.us network. Using the search terms “wmv” and “flv”, I found Media Convert, (word of caution - Media Convert is an ad supported network and several of the ads were of a questionable nature to view in a K-12 environment. For adult use only) a free online converter. Converting the projects from a .wmv to a .wmv format, I was then able to upload them into VoiceThread.
Embedded, you will see the current progress of the group, with about half of the projects turned in, converted, and uploaded. They are looking very good, for one week’s worth of work, especially when they have also been discussing the book that they have been reading, On Paradise Drive.
I enjoy the times when our AP US History Teacher, Kevin Randolph, and I sit down to talk about embedding new ways of learning and new tools to accomplish the learning goals he wants to achieve within his classroom. On Wednesday, asked him to help me brainstorm about what to present at our end of the year Upper School faculty meeting. I have been give the last time slot of the last meeting of the year, with a special luncheon right after my presentation. I have to make the presentation short, sweet, and to the point while planting seeds that hopefully germinate as my colleagues begin to unwind over the summer.
I know that I want to show some highlights of the 13 Days that Changed America project, because I feel that the process that we are all going through on this project, Kevin, the student, and I, is an excellent model of what we should be aiming for. This is a collaborative project, with individual elements, that allow the students to first begin to answer an excellent question, research the event, analyze the significance of the event, and presenting their findings to a global audience, so that they can get feedback from others. There are creative uses of new technologies (wikis, VoiceThread, and Digital Story Telling software) for them to craft their message. This is truly a collaboration, with teachers serving as guides and mentors to the students on this project, as equals, not as dispensers of knowledge.
Kevin suggested that in the faculty meeting, that a podcast consisting of the reflections of the students to this project would be a valuable and be a more authentic voice to share with the faculty. Agreeing with Kevin, I began to think about how we would go about and complete this. While thinking, I had an “aha” moment, why not use the tools and technology to enable this.
Enter Gabcast, a service that allows for someone to call into a phone (land line or cell phone) into a toll-free number, and with a channel number and PIN, record their message. I first found out about this service while “attending” a session at the K12 Online Conference last October and I have been seeking the right project to incorporate this. I shared this option with Kevin, who was very excited about allowing students to use their phones and cell phones as an experiment to record their reflections.
In five minutes, we came up with the following questions we are asking the students to share their thoughts about this project. They are:
Did the elements of the project(research, analysis, collaborative learning) reflect the nature of the course?
How is the creation of a digital movie an effective way to present an argument as opposed to writing a paper?
What is the benefit of working collaboratively as opposed to working independently on a project such as this?
Was this an effective wrap up project for this AP US History course?
What are the benefit of using new technologies (PhotoStory, VoiceThread, Gabcast) on a project such as this?
How you change the project?
I am anxious to hear their thoughts and will mash up them up in a podcast that I will share via this space. Now, I have to finish up my segment, which I will try to share my reflections on the process over the weekend.
