NECC Day 2 - Monday, Second and third sessions

My second session for the day was Spreadsheets: A Dynamic Path to Understanding Math with Wendy Petti. This was a BYOL session that I had to sign up for earlier and this presenter chose to contact those attending earlier in the month to get some information on who was coming to the session and what level she could start out with, which I thought was good planning on her part. So we actually started at a more intermediate level, which was a nice change of pace. Petti had created a series of Excel spreadsheet math activities to use and each of us got one of the electronic packets to work with during the session.

Here are a few things I learned from this session:
- You can create hyperlinks between Excel worksheets in addition to having the sheets listed on the bottom of your workbook.
- Pretti encourages the use of graphs as a hands on activity before turning to using graphs on a spreadsheet (This actually makes a lot of sense as the students will get a clear idea of how to create graphs before the program does it for them).
- In an ideal world, students are going to use spreadsheets to analyze data and solve problems they would encounter in real life
- if you want to find the sum of a positive and negative number, you can actually use negative numbers in a sum formula. I didn't know you could use negative numbers!
- If you just want to show an equal sign, use a single quote sign and the equal in the cell (“=) and it won’t be part of a formula.
- Good Tip: When you make templates, just go ahead and change font and size to be bigger, so it’s easier to see

The next session I went to was Strategies for Using Blogs and Wikis with Special Education Students with Lara Long, from Fairfax County Schools. For me, this session focused more on strategies to use with Special Education students, then the strategies for how to use blogs and wikis with Special Education students, which is what I was really looking for. Being the tech specialist that I am, I wanted to see specific examples of Special Education students using blogs and wikis and the good and bad stuff the presenter had run into when implementing this with students. So it wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but I did walk away with some good ideas:
- For organization and planning purposes, use a graphic organizer to build the wiki
definiton, with examples
- Vocabulary and definitions are good things to use on a wiki and have the students work on them using the wiki and then students can get access from anywhere and it's an ongoing activity, that can be used with the community, and gives students practice time with reading and writing skills. Thinking more about this idea, I bet I could even have students add pictures and narration to the wiki and make it more interactive.
- Wikis can be used to teach special ed students functional life skills, example: A Community Travel and Field Trips wiki, which gives them something they’ve got knowledge about and have experienced

Some of what they’ve used to create wikis are: Portable word processors such as the Alphasmart Neo’s, which can then just be transfered into MS Word, adapted keyboards, such as Intellikeys, auditory word processors, word prediction software, and graphic organizer software. She also recommended www.readplease.com which is something they tell parents to download at home for student use.

After that I headed to the ITRT Pavilion, (thanks Tekkieteacher for this advice) for a session on Engaging students through active technology integrators and projects, which then ended up being cancelled. I did, however, get to see a quick demo on the Activboards and how they're new Inspired software can be used on any computer, without an activboard, just any old interactive whiteboard will do (this being a good thing since my school is a Smartboard/airliner school) and seeing some great ideas!