High Techpectations

New Ning for NECC 2008

Steve Hargadon, the one man ed tech machine, has created a new ning online community for people interested in the National Educational Computing Conference. Check it out and join today! You do not need to be an ISTE member or even attending the conference to be a member, and this should be a useful tool for following the conference wherever you are.

Steve also has a new post up on his blog and cross-posted at the Infinite Thinking Machine on his Classroom 2.0 unconference series. He just hosted a second informal ed tech get together in Phoenix and reports that it went very well. One is being organized for Chicago this fall, and hopefully Steve will have more details to post about this shortly!

NECC 2008 via kwout

Another Hit: Google Docs in Plain English

Pages tagged with "TIE585" on del.icio.us

Link: Pages tagged with "TIE585" on del.icio.us.

Last spring, I designed a new workshop for National Louis University's Technology in Education program on integrating Web 2.0 applications into the classroom, and I'm now teaching it for the first time. It's going pretty well, and I thought blog readers might want to take a look at sites we've bookmarked in del.icio.us. Students had to bookmark at least 10 sites (by this Friday) that would be helpful to the group, plus we added resources discussed in class. The resulting list provides a great set of links for starting off the school year and many sites are even new to me. Also, check out my workshop wiki; we have some examples of things we did in Flickr up there as well as the course syllabus.

NPR : This I Believe

Link: NPR : This I Believe.

I have the CD set of This I Believe essays, and this project inspired me to incorporate this into a workshop. I had the best time this week, working with area independent school teachers on learning about the latest and greatest in educational technology. This group really got along well, and I enjoyed hearing their stories and learning about their schools.

Anyway, the assignment was to use built-in iSight cameras to make movies using the This I Believe motif. We changed it up a bit to create topics such as This I Believe about Reading, This I Belief About Physical Education, etc. Teachers moved from computer to computer adding video statements to each group's project. The workshop participants seemed to have fun with this and they clearly felt passionate about the topics we covered. The resulting videos are posted in Teacher Tube (I still have to add one that I left at school on a portable hard drive) and I am so pleased with the results. The audio is something we needed to work on, though, as we had to compete with a lot of background chatter. We were all having so much fun!

Take a look!

lucygrayworkshops » home

Link: lucygrayworkshops » home.

I've created a wiki to house materials from presentations and workshops I conduct. My first entry is a set of pages for a workshop I'm teaching at my former school July 10, 11, and 12th. Feel free to join the wiki to use the materials, make suggestions, or add to the body of material collected here.