Academic Aesthetic

After writing up my summary of the PETE&C DEN event I noticed that it can easily be divided into 7 sections. So, rather than bombard you with a large report I’ll post one section a day this week. Short, sweet, bite-size chunks of information work much better for me, and hopefully for you as well.

Again, this is also a podcast.

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The first breakout session I attended was run by the DEN’s own Scott Kinney, who only had to drive down the road to attend the conference. (The lucky guy lives in Hershey.) His presentation was all about the diversity in our classrooms and how unitedstreaming could help us meet the needs of today’s classrooms.

If I wasn’t already sold on unitedstreaming.com I would have reacted to this like so many other vendor presentations, but since they had me at multimedia downloads I paid attention to find out what else unitedstreaming could do.

We started with a quiz, and the answers were a bit surprising to us. I’d list them here, but I forgot his source so I can’t properly cite his statistics.

The main point of this warm-up was that our schools are a lot more diverse than we thought.

Since unitedstreaming has lots of features from subtitles to online quizzes to encyclopedia articles, It really does help people who have a variety of learning styles.

This morning I left two things on the counter that were meant to go to school with me:

1. My Lunch. I had no cash on me, so my lunch was in fact irreplaceable. I would just have to wait until after school to get a bite to eat.
2. My Camera. I didn’t have any lessons planned for today that required the use of a camera, digital or otherwise. Even if something came up in a spur of the moment, I still had my standby camera and a 256 MB card.

So guess which item I missed more today?

That’s right, the replaceable digital camera I didn’t even need.

Hello, my name is Aaron, and I’m a digital junkie.

After writing up my summary of the PETE&C DEN event I noticed that it can easily be divided into 7 sections. So, rather than bombard you with a large report I’ll post one section a day this week. Short, sweet, bite-size chunks of information work much better for me, and hopefully for you as well.

Again, this is also a podcast.

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During the keynote I had the pleasure of sitting next to Cristina Runkles, whose third grade class has just started podcasting. We exchanged web addresses since we were both into blogging and podcasting.

I’ve already listened to her students’ work, and it’s good stuff! Just imagine what these third graders will be capable of when they graduate, having experienced cutting edge technology at such an early level.

After writing up my summary of the PETE&C DEN event I noticed that it can easily be divided into 7 sections. So, rather than bombard you with a large report I’ll post one section a day this week. Short, sweet, bite-size chunks of information work much better for me, and hopefully for you as well.

Oh yeah, this is also a podcast. Enjoy.

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The first keynote speaker was Kathy Schrock, and she did a great job going over tips for visual presentations. Now granted, I knew most of her tips due to my training as an art teacher, but I’ve sat through far too many presentations (done by adults who should have known better) that included sounds, transitions, pictures, fonts, and even colors that just did not belong.

And of course the whole thing was made even better because she put examples and notes from her presentation online for us. This took a lot of pressure off of the people who were taking notes, and it also meant one less handout for us to file and forget. (I myself intend to use wikis for my presentations, since my last wiki is still the number one downloaded resource on the new DEN site. … how did THAT happen?!)

I’m working on write-ups and/or podcasts for the PETE&C DEN event, really! But until then, I have something else to share.

I was going through my site statistics to find out what kinds of websites are leading people here. Some of them are obviously just from people clicking on that “Next Blog” link at the top to see another Blogger blog (is that too redundant?), but others are nice to know or, at the very least … interesting. In a lot of these searches I’m finding myself in very nice company.

• academic podcast (Google Search)
• aesthetic art education (MSN Search)
• aesthetic drawing (Google Search)
• art (Google Blog Search) (I’m not on that page any more - it updates too often)
• Acting to Improve
• Edu-Blogging 101: Teacher Blogs (Yes this is a shameless plug, but it’s also a way that somebody found this site.)
• flickr+limit (Google Search)
• “Helen South” books (Google Search)
• “new literacy” vs. “old literacy” (Google Search)

Ok, enough ego boosting for one day. My next post SHOULD contain a podcast, one way or another.

I’m sorry to say the quality of this video is below what I wanted, but I still got to talk to a lot of people at the PETE & C preconference that was sponsored by the Discovery Educator Network.

Are you interested in having your K-12 class work with another class in another school for a lesson, project, or other activity? That’s why the Collaborative Lessons group is here!

Just place a pin in our Frappr map, including the subject to which you’d like your lesson to relate. Include an email address in your “shoutout” message, along with any other specifics you’d like to add, and then other teachers will be able to see where you are and what you’d like to do.

Sometimes teachers want to do a collaboration with another class but just can’t think of a good lesson idea. That’s what this wiki is for! If you’ve got a cool concept for a collaborative lesson just go to the appropriate page (or make your own if the page doesn’t exist) and add in your idea.

Don’t worry about mistakes or immature people going in to change the pages in a bad way, every change is saved so we can always go back to the way the site used to be.

As someone who loves education, technology, and art, I always enjoy when I see someone putting all three together. Usually this means some sort of digital artwork is the end result, but not always.

Take Sue, for example. She’s doing a unit on Monet and wants some advice, tips, tricks, and so on. Rather than just limit herself to asking a handful of teachers, she’s set up a wiki where lesson ideas can be exchanged.

I’ve already given her my two cents, but if you’d like to join in and help the password is “lessonideas” without the quotes.

Yesterday I arrived at the Hershey Lodge for the PETE & C Preconference sponsored by DEN. (Wow, what a name!) I couldn’t go to the full conference, but this one day event was too good to pass up.

To be honest, it wasn’t truly a one day fling - last night a bunch of DEN members got together to have dinner and socialize for a few hours. While we were still in the lobby waiting to go I had the opportunity to meet David Warlick.

It was quite convenient that I was talking to DEN managers Michelle Adams and Jannita Demian, or I would have never had such a chance encounter. They got hugs and hearty greetings while I got a wave and a handshake.

Dave had no idea who I was, but why should he?

At dinner my wife and I got to sit across from Kathy Schrock and discuss everything from family to educational podcasting.

Kathy had no idea who I was, either.

The next day I had the great honor of meeting Steve Dembo himself, who only recognized me because my hat had “Art Guy” written on it. (He mentioned at the time that I didn’t look anything like he imagined.)

This is the part of the story where I’m supposed to say that after shaking hands with all of these powerhouses in educational technology I’m never going to wash my hand again, but that’s just gross, isn’t it?

There’s a point to this beyond incessant name dropping. You see, I was getting a little worried that I might be getting a little too full of myself. I mean, let’s face it - I’ve got over 2,000 kids that freak out every time I walk into one of their classrooms.

Now, having met these icons of ed tech that are doing so much more than me to further the cause, I think I have a much better sense of self.

After all, I’m way too much of a fanboy to be all that famous, right?

(PS: More info on the conference, including a podcast or two, will be forthcoming as soon as my Powerbook is up and running again.)

Earlier this week my hard drive began to make a very unsettling noise. Seeing this as the beginning of the end I immediately backed up all of my files. I would have replaced the hard drive, and in fact I’ve done just that on several occasions, but with this particular laptop I think it would be too risky for me to do so.

So it’s at a repair center and will be returned next week with a new (and larger) drive. I’m getting by thanks to school computers (even if most of them are running Windows…) and my spare home computer, which just happens to be an old Compaq running Linux. I really like this Linux install, too - I don’t think this thing was this fast when it was new!

It’s also quite fortunate that I transfered my blog over to Blogger and my rss feeds over to Bloglines before the fateful day, even if I still have no way to put podcasts onto my iPod until I get my laptop back.

Unfortunately this means I won’t have my laptop when I head up to the PETE&C preconference sponsored by DEN. I’ve got to find another way to blog about it.

Feh.