FETC Continued

Friday was another full day at FETC. I started out with "It’s Not the Tools You Have in Your Math Class, But How You Use Them". It wasn't quite the session I thought it would be, but I think I got some good resources. I have to give the presenters credit though. Both were former teachers in New Orleans (pre-Katrina, as they called it) and after the hurricane lost their jobs. Somehow they both ended up with jobs in Canada, but have now come back to New Orleans to work as consultants with their old school district.

They had a lot of math lessons already created on this site: http://mathology.pbwiki.com. I think this will be a good resource.

Then I moved onto "Online Technology Application Can Be Used To Teach Middle School Math" I was expecting a bunch of free websites math teachers could use, but I didn't get that. So I decided to go walk around the exhibit hall. I got some free stuff, but didn't see many tools that I would be interested in finding out more about.

After that I joined other DEN educators for lunch in the DEN room. During lunch we had a presentation by tech4learning.com on one of their new programs called Frames. What a neat little animation program. I think this will come in handy and I will be getting one soon! Then we got a tour of the new Discovery Educator website and the new features. I am thinking of adding blog posts there too...we'll see.

Then I stopped by the Digital Language Arts session and got some great ideas by some Virginia Beach educators. The intelthinking.com website has some great tools, such as the ranking tool. I think this will come in handy with SmartBoards and Airliners. These educators also really like thinkquest.com, a website I used last year with students in a website competition. But there were other features I learned about too, such as the discussion boards. Here is a website that includes their information: www.Digitallanguagearts.net

Then I went to another session that I ended up not being too thrilled about, and on a whim, (I'm going to eat my words here) walked into another SmartBoard session. It was about time as I finally found teachers explaining how they use SmartBoards in their class. THANK YOU! Granted, it was elementary, but I got ideas to use with middle school. Did you know you could animate things in Smart Notebook 10-as in movies? I didn't know the page recorder could do that! And it's so easy! They are going to send me a CD of some of their resources. So that ended a great day at the convention center.

Some time mid-day I was looking at twitter and found out a bunch of edubloggers were going to the restaurant across the street from my hotel. So around 9, I wandered over and got to know some great educators and exchanged info and am excited to see most of them at NECC in June! If you are attending some conferences in the next few months, check out this website and schedule a meet up! http://www.edubloggercon.com

It was a long day, but well worth it. I am almost over with today's sessions and then we get to hear the great Hall Davidson for our closing ceremonies.