NECC Slideshow

Enjoy this slideshow of my pictures from my first NECC experience. Denver next year maybe??

NECC Day 4 - Wednesday sessions

My first session of the day on Wednesday was Differentiating NETS*T: Moving Teachers Toward Transformative Technology with Kurt Kohls, Amy Crowley-Gonsoulin, and Aron Sterling from Fairfax County. This was a great presentation and helped me to see some avenues I can use when explaining and implementing the NETS*T with teachers.

The first thing they did was to introduce themselves via a voki avatar. Then they gave us the website they created where we could find more information after the presentation at http://conferenceconnection2009.edublogs.org In the NETS*T there are initially 5 different categories which are further broken down into 4 indicators, those being beginning, developing, proficient, and transformative indicators. They are going to walk us through the stages showing examples for how to implement technology with each category/indicator.

The first category they chose was, "teachers must use their knowledge with use of technology to promote student creativity and learning". The indicator was moving from a beginning stage to a developing stage and the technology tool they chose is one called Blabberize. This website is very easy to use as you select images and animate them in such a way as to make the image talk. The hardest part of this webiste is define where mouth should be. Then record your voice, make sure mouth is moving the way you want, save, and you can create an account to save all of your characters, and then you can share it!

The next category they chose was "Digital Age Learning Experience and Assessment- Creating learning experience for students who is going to be using digital age tools". Indicator level is developing stage to proficient stage. Technology tools to use is combining Blabberize characters into a blog, wiki, (even schoolfusion page) etc. The blogging page they use is Edublogs. This is also a great way to differentiate with different learning styles. They way to incorporate the two is by using the embed code from Blabberize and copy/pasting it into blog, schoolfusion page, etc. Their number one hint: Don’t be scared of the embed code!!!

The next category is addressing diverse needs of students and the indicator is developing stage to proficient stage and the technology tool is a voki, where you can put in pictures of your own for backgrounds and use phone, mic, or text to type to make voices. Here's a great way to use this with Social Studies: Could take picture of politician, president and use it that way!

Later on in the session they continued to share these great tools and ideas for the NETS*T. I definitely enjoyed this session and found it to be very helpful.

The next session I went to was Caravans Around the World with Google Earth which was a model lesson session and I got to play around with Google Earth and create a tour of Spain. It was a great session, because I got to learn more about Google Earth and meet some nice people from Canada and help them out a little as we were all learning. I'll have more on this session later as Google Earth is one of my summer goals to work on.

The last session I attended on Wednesday wasCool Google Tools with Tammy Worcester. Another great session! I am an avid user of all things Google and did already know much about what Worcester presented, but I did learn some new moves too! The first thing I learned is that I can use Email or a mobile phone to send posts to my blog. I kinda of already knew that, but Worcester made is sound so easy! I could also set up an sms service and send text messages from my phone to my blog. Worcester also showed us Google Docs, and in the forms section I got a brillant idea. We could use Google Docs to get information from parents. At the beginning of the year, I could work with teachers/team leaders to create a form and put on their schoolfusion pages and then during back to school night, during a schoolfusion training session, parents put info, and teachers get their information already put into a spreadsheet-with no typing on their behalf!!

Another thing I really liked was Google Alerts, which Wwill email you when something new is indexed on internet and it sends you an email. This is a great idea for parents who want to know if something new is on the internet, most especially your kids name!!

Just put in search terms and how often you want it to be sent to you and you don’t have to have google account to do this!

Wednesday was a great day as far as session went and I thought this was my most productive day at the conference.

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.”

NECC Day 2 - Monday, Last Session

My last session on the day on Monday was just as exciting as my first one! I went to Podcasting Your Way to Measurable Results with Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams and these guys were great! Hilarious, fun, I would have loved to have been a student in their classes and they all teach high school Chemistry, which was not one of my favorite subjects. Bergmann and Sams teach at the school and often not only plan lessons together, but teach them together too--through their podcasts.

They started out by saying that the program they were presenting was something you could do over night-it took them three years to get to where they are now. I fully appreciated hearing this as I often forget that some things need to build and grow and mature over time and that you learn along the way and each things get better and (hopefully!) easier.

They got right to business and told us the programs and tools they use when creating their podcasts (making a joke that the participants only wanted this information-they were really funny!) They use (some programs are only mac or PC): Camtasia studio, Wacom Graphire, Wacom Bamboo, Samson CO3U Mic, Screenflow, Jing, and a Built in Mic.
And then they asked and answered three questions: Can teachers get more time?
Is mastery possible? Can differentiation happen? The answer to all was a resounding YES!

In year 1: Recording Live! They recorded their live lessons and put them on the internet.

They discovered:
They needed to Collaborate, share, and model together.
They found the students were taking ineffective notes, getting frustrated at home
and there were gaps in their learning.

They thought: We have to make our class time have value!
What do students think the most often when learning a new concept: I wish I could stop the teacher and re-hear it! Well, with podcasting they can. When students are struggling at home or in school to figure out a concept, what they really need is to have a teacher with them. Again, with podcasting they can!

Year 2: Pre-Vodcasting
One of the things they recommended was that if you are going to be doing podcasts/vodcasts, watch some so you get an understanding of what they are and how to set one up.
They decided in this year of their project that they were going to switch some things around; homework is now going to be to watchin the lesson - and in class let’s work on the problems! Which is where students seemed to need the most help. Switching the process of what goes on in the classroom.

They also decided that the podcasts were better with having both of them, because it was more like a conversation and it made it easier for the kids relate to.

Here's a re-creation of a chart they share with us. In one column was what their classes were like without the podcasting/vodcasting and in the next column was what it was like with it.

Without Vodcasting
Warm up activity, 5 mins
Go over previous night’s homework, 20 mins
Leccture new content, 30-45 mins
Guided practice, 20-35 mins

With Vodcasting
Warm-up, 5 mins
Q&A on podcast, 10 min
Guided practice, rest of the time!

They began to notice that they got to meet with every single one of their kids every day! They were also able to do more lab activities and engaging hands on activities, there were No D’s and and Fewer F’s and C’s in their classes. And they realized that on tests students who were watching the podcasts with lower math scores did just as well as the kids who weren’t watching the podcasts with higher math scores.

They ended up having positive student and parent feedback; parents were coming back saying thank you and that they were learning by watching the podcasts too!

Year 3: Mastery Learning
In this year, they got a foreign exchange student halfway through the year, and they were worried if she would be able to pass the class having missed a semester. She watched the podcasts and caught up!

By this point, they had realized that the vodcasts end up being sort-of self paced, that students were becoming independent learners, the gaps in understanding were diminishing, and those having trouble had no place to hide.

While listening to this, I realized that if we were to do this at my school, we could have students take test using a software program called ExamView and as teachers we could look at the reports to find out concepts where students are struggling and the students could then go back and watch the podcast on those areas. So if "Jimmy" hadn't mastered the concepts on Science 3.4, he could go back and watch the podcast where the teacher had covered concept 3.4. Instant review tool!

The students prefer mastery model Bergmann and Sams implemented in year 3, 2:1.

They also showed us an example of a Language Arts teacher who would pull up an essay astudent wrote, and then she would screen capture and record the edits and corrections of the essay so that student could be "walked" through those steps. She does this with every student's paper and she puts it on their webpages and then later the class heads down to the lab and with headphones, they all have her voice and explanations of the edits and corrections right there in front of them!
She said it doesn’t’ take her any more time than when she was grading papers before. She's calls it: “It's Hot Off the Press”

Another great reason to do this: When there’s a sub, you can still teach your kids while you’re gone, because you've already recorded the lesson!

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!

NECC Day 2 - Monday, First session

Here's my wrap up of my first session at NECC from Monday.

I started out with a great session on Enabling Reading with 21st Century Skills with John Long and Debbie Svec. They had 6 ways to use technology through Digital Reading Portfolios, Graphic Organizers, Ipod/iread, Gaming Software, Podcasting, and Webchats. Not only was he a dynamic speaker, the examples he showed us of students using the technology spoke for itself.

With Digital Reading portfolios, Long captures students reading samples throughout the year, which he can store for authentic assessment. Some of the advantages he found by doing this was: Students try harder because they hear themselves and want to sound better. He said one student went home and practiced and came back saying he was determined to sound better than he did the day before; Parents like it because they can hear student improvement, If using ipod, you can put the recording straight into itunes and parents can hear from home, or you can burn a CD at the end of the year.

With graphic organizers, Long used Inspiration and Kidspiration in the normal ways of brainstorming and organizing thoughts, but he also used it for storyboarding for digital storytelling projects. I thought this was another inventive way to use this software and I would like to try it with any projects we do in Comic Life next year.

Svec's ipod and iread program is what interested me the most. In this program, students would check out the text version of a book and an ipod with the audio verison to read along with the text to enhance fluency. They were able to do this project through an initial grant and bought something like 200 ipod nanos. The kids only use it at home and check the ipods out when they leave school and back in, in the morning and the ipods charge during the day. In the length of time they have been doing this project only 1 pod was ever lost and the parent quickly replaced it. That's pretty good numbers! They buy the audio book versions off of itunes. One teacher asked, "What if the students don't pay attention to the audio" and Long explained that that may occur at first, but the students quickly use both as they find it better to understand the both the text and the audio.

With Gaming, Svec uses Cranium Core, an online program that has read alouds and games, and then they add discuss and defend groups, which allows the students to build their reading, writing and listening skills, adds an engagement factor, and resources to intervention strategy. One of the main aspects this program works with is main idea and author’s purpose. The presenters said that the students would actually begin arguing in class about author’s purpose with each other because they were so into it. It really allowed the students to have social interaction with each other and let them talk about the issues in the book. The price really can't be beat either; $365 a year for the entire school and it sounds like any book you read, you can use this program with it. I really want to check out this website and this program!

Then Long talked about podcasting. He's got three student teams that he has put together: 1) MOD Squad (Multimedia on Demand), which does digital storytelling and guides, 2) Tech Ambassadors, and 3) Team TLC. With the training he has done at their school, there are over 200 teacher websites, with over 900 podcasts from 2 years, and they get an average of 150,000 hits a week! Absolutely amazing stuff! One of the teachers he works with does a podcast a week, and throught their podcasting (this nearly broke my heart) a parent who is serving in Iraq and was able to hear his daughter and stay in contact with her. They showed three examples of student podcasting: !) Student who did a book review, but told the parts of the book that held the conflict, the resolution, etc. 2)Students did a promotional commercials for books. This example was Farenheit 451-imagine a world without books? And from there they created a story to get kids to read the book. 3) Students did Q&A sessions. One student acted as host, and another student who read the book and answers the questions. The student used anecdotes when answering and talked about how his life experiences are similar to those of the main character.

The last thing we looked at were web chats. One of the groups Svec worked with was a group she created called the GStar Girls, who asked one day how they could talk with the author of the book they had finished reading. By email, the teacher contacted the author and the girls got to use ichat to ask author questions. This could also probably be done with Skype. I've heard of a lot of people, including Oprah Winfrey who are using Skype to communicate.

Great session with lots of great ideas!

My First Day at Necc

So here I am at NECC! This place is HUGE and there are so MANY things to see and learn and do! I went up on Sunday to get the lay of the land, volunteer and attend the opening keynote address with Malcolm Gladwell. I started out by volunteering in Presenter's World for three hours, and helping presenter's get some of those last minute presentations put together. I met teachers from Ireland, Ohio, Canada, and some great student presenters who were eager to try out their presentations on me. They were both from schools that use alternative assessments in their schools, with portfolios and online classes. They were so excited to be here and share what they've learned with teachers from around the world.

After my volunteer hours, I attempted to get into the ISTE Member welcome and orientation session, which had started earlier, but the fire marshall was doing a great job and the room was over capacity, so the session was closed. Patience paid off though, as some people left the room and they let some more people back in, and I was able to catch the last 20 or so minutes and see the great digital storytelling videos for the ISTE contest and vote on the winner. I then ran into some colleagues of mine, grabbed an expensive chicken sandwich (isn't convention food always expensive?) and up to the ballrooms for the keynote.

The president of ISTE spoke about some upcoming changes, such as changing the name of NECC to ISTE. All the promotional ads and brochures for next year bear the ISTE2010 in Denver on them. I don't like name changes after something has been used for so long and people know it by that name, but in this case, I'm happy about this change. It is now a global organization and with 60 different countries attending NECC this year, it's also a proven point.

Then Gladwell spoke. He is an author of three books on the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences. Many of the things he said makes sense with education, such as students who work harder and put forth the effort will do well in the long run. He provided some interesting examples (rock bands and football players) that I wouldn't immediately think would relate to education. Specifically, he talked about Fleetwood Mac, the Beatles, and some top NFL players. He made some very good points with these examples and remember my own experiences as a student struggling in certain subject areas, but that the effort I put forth often helped me get through those challenges. I thought one of the best thoughts I took away from the keynote was, success grows from having had many failures, not successes. It's very true and something I often forget when I'm frustrated with something not turning out the way I want it to.

After the keynote address, I went to the Opening gala and met up with teachers in my current county and my previous one. It was great catching up with them and talking about what we've done this year. Tomorrow I'll report on how Monday went.