Things from NECC

Hey guys! I am back and came back with so many incredible ideas from NECC that I can't wait to do with my teachers in the fall. I went to many podcasting, blogs, and Universal Design sessions. I really came back with some great resources. Since I have much to prepare for Friday, I can't list them all today, but I will blog again and add them for you all soon. I was thinking that it would be cool to have one blog site where we can still get together and share ideas after we are done...anyone else?

Anyway, the site I cannot not wait to share with you is http://www.imbee.com/teacher
It is a free social networking site for teachers to use with their students. (Caution though...still may need to get permission to use, but this is a great place to take a look at) Teachers would set up an account and invite students to join. Parents give permission first and every time their child logs in, their parents get an update. Parents can also view what is going on. I seems like a great site. Check it out and let me know what you think. See you all tomorrow!

June 20, 2007

I know we are coming to an end, but there still seems so much to do to get ready for exit next week. NECC couldn't have some at a worse time, but I am excited about going. Today, I was on the NECC conference site and looked at the program. I discivered a neat planning feature where I could explore the program and then add a session to my planner. The planner kept track of all of the sessions I was interested in. Of all the conferences I have gone to, I have never seen anything like this. Conference planning is going high tech. No more carrying around the big booklet anymore with marked up pages of sessions you want to go to. As I was scanning the sessions, there are many on wikis, podcasts and blogs. I do plan to go to a couple of these sessions because I really enjoy to hear ideas that other come up with on how to use them in the classroom. I have been to podcasting sessions before and many of them show Garageband on the mac, which doesn't really help us in our schools. I was really excitied to see a podcasting for windows session. Other sessions I am excited to go to are universal design (yes, I was surprised to see one too!), students podcasting daily news and many more...I leave Sunday morning. I will have to let you all know how it goes.

June 14

Wow! Did I really miss blogging this past week. Maybe I was just too caught up in reading everyone Else's. I must say I am quite impressed with the thoughts of many in our group...so creative and some pretty deep. I can at least be the light and simple for everyone. In class our group was discussing the hope that this semester was being taken in an entire semester instead of 6 weeks. The new tools we have been learning about have been very fun and it would have been great if we would have had more time to really explore them like we explored Wikipedia. Another thought is that we could have had 1 blog that just discussed Will Richardson's book. There are so many good websites that he discusses that we could have evaluated for ourselves and wrote about them in a blog.

Completing our Public Service Announcements in a digital format really made me appreciate it. It was so much easier than doing in camera editing on the old VHS cameras and it is so much cleaner. Thank God for the technology age!