Category: Education

Blogs in education are endagered. Why? Read what Weblogg-ed has to say about it. Then get ahold of your representatives in Congress and tell them how you feel.

Yes, I know they’re mainly targeting MySpace. Unfortunately, the bill is so broadly written that most if not all blogs will have to be banned at school.

I’ll have more to say about this later, when I’ve had time to collect my thoughts.

EDIT: A wiki has been set up to create a collaborative letter to our congresspeople. I’ve already added my (minor) contributions and sent one to my Representative. A link is included near the top to allow you to contact your Representative quickly and easily.

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?

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.