The “Power Plant” was once just that, but now it has the best looking storefronts in the Inner Harbor.

Learn more here.

Watch this video to learn about this floating classroom that used to be a Buy Boat.

This is more footage from the Discovery Educator Network’s “Capture the Inner Harbor” event. I’m slowly going through everything and placing it online.

My 60th podcast is a recording of my session at MICCA. (I talked about blogging, as you can see in the title.) I promised to have it up on the same day, so here you go.
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Links:
discoveryeducatornetwork.com
Blogging 101 (My Wiki about blogging)
Room132.com (The class blog maintained by Bre Pettis)
Weblogg-ed (The website of Will Richardson, a pioneer in edu-blogging)
Technorati.com (Google for blogs)
OpenOffice.org (Just like Microsoft Office … but FREE)
Blogger.com (My blog host)
Bloglines.com (The site I use to check other blogs)
Think.com, Class Blogmeister, & Gaggle.net (These three are all free services that offer a “closed” blogging environment.)

Wondering who else has been mentioning MICCA in their blogs? A quick search on Technorati.com brought up the following results:

• Will Richardson did a workshop here, and even graced my own session with his presence.
• Cristina Runkles had a session on podcasting next door to my blogging session. Being the tech savvy person she is, she’s placed her notes online.

If you attended MICCA as well, I encourage you to write up your opinions on the conference. What do you think?

Day 2, and the Keynote speaker is Deneen Frazier Bowen. Her presentation is apparently called “The Natives Are Restless.” I can only assume at this point that she’ll be talking about the distinction between “digital natives” and “digital immigrants,” but from a slightly different angle. (Otherwise, she wouldn’t be the Keynote.)

HA! She’s really doing a nice take on this, assuming a personality and presenting as someone else. There won’t be many people walking out early for this one.

I won’t be typing much, because with this I’ve already missed several good parts.

UPDATE: Oh wow, that Keynote speaker had some acting skills! She assumed multiple personalities, most of them of different digital natives. I don’t know if I should be happy or upset that I was able to follow along with 99% of what those personas were talking about.

The personalities were real kids. Apparently she spent months interviewing and working with kids, and today she shared their stories.

I need to see this person present again.

It’s the start of day 2 of MICCA, and the students are starting to roll in.

That’s right, I said students.

Yesterday they handed out some awards to teachers and administrators, but today the pre-keynote award ceremony is for students doing cool things with technology. In all honesty I think today’s awards are much more important than yesterday’s.

Why? Because in education the bottom line should always be the student and what he or she is achieving. If I have to explain that then you’re not really a teacher.

Last session of the day, and believe it or not I’m not attending the one on unitedstreaming. It’s worth seeing, but I experienced the same session at the PETE&C conference a while back.

With unitedstreaming out of the picture, it was almost a toss up as to which session I should see, but I finally picked one.

NASA’s got a bunch of projects at their NASA Quest website. Some of it’s a little dinky on the content (coloring pages), but other parts are a little more robust (design an aircraft). They even have Spanish and Chinese language versions – which I didn’t expect from a government site.

At this point the presenter (Valerie Hawkins) is continuing with a walkthrough. She’s shown us that the NASA Quest page is diverse in features, but the back row was crowded when she started and now I’m the only one in it. (I would be sitting closer to the front with the rest of the remaining 25 or so teachers, but I’m making use of the power outlet back here.)

My guess is that there’s nothing wrong with the presentation, but as the last session of the day it’s cursed to have a large percentage of walk-outs. The same thing’s probably happening in all the sessions, and it will most likely be even worse tomorrow.

I promised myself this morning that I wouldn’t attend any sessions that mentioned the words “PowerPoint, “Office,” or “Inspiration.” Not because the programs are bad, but because conferences like this are often beyond saturated with sessions that show how to use those programs. I want something more.

So now I’m sitting here waiting for this session about PowerPoint (Presented by Jeanne Noorisa and Marsye Kaplan) to start. Why? Because it’s about making books. Now that’s just cool.

Hm, this is the first session I’ve been to all day that actually has a handout. Using three sessions isn’t much of a sample size, but it seems like we’re moving from dead tree handouts to digital ones – a welcome change.

This session’s al about “talking books,” which are more or less digital presentations that include text, images, and audio components. They’re created to help students that have mental, physical, or motivational reasons why they can’t always enjoy paper books.

With those requirements in place, the rest is totally up to you. You don’t even have to make the book yourself, since your students can create their own books to enjoy. I’m imagining my students creating a story, then having each kid illustrate a different page which they will then read into a microphone.

Hm, she’s focussing mostly on Windows. I’m not surprised, since that’s what most people use. This stuff will all work with Mac anyway.

Ah, she’s touching on copyright – there’s a copyright law amendment that allows teachers to make multimedia copies of books for students with disabilities. If your students fit into that category then remixing an existing book is fair game.

Tricks to make the books better:

• Time delays to prevent “happy clickers” from fast forwarding to the end of the book.
• A back button so students can read previous pages.
• Include pictures to go with the words to help beginning readers. (She used a program called “Boardmaker Plus,” but I found a website called Phrasr that does something similar.

More Talking Books:
(I’ll add these later)

Resources:

• Pics for Learning
• AP Multimedia Archive
• Ditto
• Google Image Search
• Classroom Clipart
• Kids Image Search Tools
• Free Foto
• Free Images
• Microsoft Clip Art Gallery

… what, no Flickr: Creative Commons or YoToPhoto?

The last time I attended this conference was two years ago, and things have changed a lot since then. Most notable is the fact that MICCA is taking up a lot less real estate.

Back then they took up three floors, with the sessions on the 2nd floor, administration, registration, souvenirs, etc. on the 1st floor, and the vendors all regulated to the basement. Now, except for registration and a small art exhibit, we’re all on the 2nd floor.

If I hadn’t been here two years ago when the building was so crowded it was hard to find a seat, I wouldn’t have noticed. I have a good idea why MICCA shrank, but I won’t get into that right now.

The good news is I got to see all the vendors during lunch, and I didn’t even have to skip a session to do it. This bodes well for me tomorrow, as it means people will be less likely to skip out of my session to play with the Macs that Apple has set up.

Woohoo! The next session doesn’t hae any outlets, but it’s about art, education, and technology. This is right up my alley.

It’s being presented by Aileen Pugliese-Castro, who is forward thinking enough to not have a handout, but rather put things online.

She used a company called Original Works to do some fund raising and buy all kinds of tech goodies for her art classroom. I’ll have to check that company out when I have the time. I’ve used Cafe Press in the past to put my own artwork on t-shirts and the like, but they have a high overhead that makes fundraisers much less productive.

This is great – she has enough computers in her room to have students frequently use them for worksheets, poster making, research (World Book Online, mostly), and even self portraits using drawing programs. She also keeps hard copies around just in case there was a bad ‘net day.

I would love to do things like this in my classroom, but as I don’t have one I need to find ways to modify these plans. Perhaps for some classes I’ll have the kids meet me in the computer lab rather than have them wait for me to push my cart into their classroom. That’ll take more time to plan and set up, but I know it’ll be worth it.

I’ll have to ask her about blogging…