NECC Day 3

Here's my wrap up from Tuesday's sessions:

My first session of the day was another BYOL session that I had registered for earlier. It was Gaming and Social Causes with Debra Sprague from George Mason University, (where I got my graduate degree from). I was little curious and thought I would try it in addition to liking online simuations and gaming activities for learning. Here again, I guess I was looking for something more, I'm not sure why, this type of session is set up to give you time to "play" with the material on your own laptop and ask questions, which I had time to do. Maybe I was thinking there would be ideas on implementation practices too.

My next session was one I was very excited about: Writing for ISTE Publications. One of my great enjoyments is writing and I had thought at one time of a being a writer in the magazine industry, so this was right up my alley! I got information from all of the editors who work for the journals and magazines published by ISTE and what their tips are for teachers looking to write some articles.

And then something amazing happened! I took a lunch break and wandered down to the exhibit hall, where I saw a colleague sitting at the eInteractive booth and joined her for a little demo. I had also sat through an eInteractive demo back at FETC and knew a little bit about the products they were demo-ing. And then during their giveaway at the end of the demo, I won an Interactive Mobi! Oh, did that make my day (and made me very red in the face!) I can't wait to try this out!

And then I went to my last session for the day, which was Smartboarding 202 with Bret Gensburg from the University of Akron. I thought Gensburg had a great way of introducing his session. As participants entered, he had lively music playing and I think we all were getting into the beat and those sleepy eyes from lunch were waking up! He even played drum corps music, which only a small population of people would know what I'm talking about, but boy, was I excited at hearing this!

He opened up his presentation with a great thought provoking question: “Are you presenting your content or are you teaching your content?” There's a big difference! Here are some other ideas and tips from his presentation:
- History and Social Studies, can find photos of famous figures and speeches in the gallery and create interactive activities in Smart Notebook. His example was a photo of Martin Luther King, Jr. with his "I Have a Dream" speech given at theLincoln Memorial, only a few blocks from where the convention was held. This same activity could also be done with pictures and sounds from DE streaming and their builders, it doesn't have to be just in Smart Notebook.

- You can clone items and drag them to a new page, you don't have to copy/paste.

- You can also link graphics to websites or other pages within Smart Notebook, or even to a DE streaming video.

- Another good idea for those times where you want to copy/paste something from the internet, like a graphic and it won’t let you right click on it and save the image or copy it, take the capture tool and capture it right to Smart Notebook!

- On a mac computer, you can also drag a graphic from a website and drag into a Smart Notebook file

- Picture transparency, you can get rid of the white background on any copied or saved image!! A teacher and I were just trying to figure this out last week and now I know the answer!

Gensberg left us with one more great quote:
“The kids know more about technology than we do, because they learn from what we ewe know collectively and put it all together.”