Social Bookmarking

The sites primarily discussed in this session were delicious and Diigo. One idea of how this could be used in the classroom that was discussed in a previous session was when having your students use such sites for doing research or for collecting and sharing information with the rest of the class is to have them all tag particular bookmarks with a specific tag. Then run a widget on the class blog that shows the RSS feed for that particular tag and it will aggregate the bookmarks in a central location for the whole class to then see.

Online Safety in a Connected World

Rather than attempt to describe all of the great stuff the Brian Mull discussed during this session here is a link to his notes.

Web 2.0 for Newbies

OK, so perhaps this session was not geared toward me. But that is alright, sometimes it is good to review from the beginning because you never know you might pick up something new. Which I did. Here are some new things that I found: GCast (Great website for making quick easy podcasts using your phone) Zamzar, Mediaconverter (Both good sites for downloading adn saving videos from Youtube so they can be used in a school where Youtube is blocked) , and protopage. Also Google Reader (A great RSS Reader) was talked about. Another reason why I attended this is because it was good to see how web 2.0 would be presented to new users.

A Day in the Life (of a Teacher Teaching with Technology)

What Darren Kuropatwa is doing with his students is pretty amazing. He regularly uses Smartboards, Blogs, Podcasting, Slideshare, and many other things in his daily lessons and he puts out a ton of content for anyone to use. He highly recommended the Smartboard Lesson Podcast which I have not heard of but will definitely check out. He says that it gives out lots of different ideas for using a smartboard in the classroom. He does a blog for each of his classes where the students provide the majority of the content including one student each day that will be the scribe and basically take notes on that days lesson and then post. So that all of the students have no excuse really for not knowing what went on in a days lesson. Here is a link to his blog as well as a blog for one of his classes. Also here is a free online education conference.

Keynote - John Davitt

Some very interesting tools were discussed in this keynote. Such as classtools, newtools (John's own site), Audacity (Which I use all of the time, fantastic Open Source software), Scratch, Kiva (A great website for helping out different entrepreneurs with loans), and Evernote. Also John was quite an entertaining presenter, who filled his keynote with plenty of humor to keep the mood light.

Tried and Tested: Quick Easy Ways to Integrate technology in PK -4th

This was a great session. The presenter was a PE teacher so it was interesting to see how she integrated Technology into PE class. The way that she did it was recording the students doing activities such as describing the activities of the heart. She found that when they children are doing something that is being recorded that they are more engaged and are striving to do better. She also found that when she would bring in a new piece of technology such as an iPod or a Flip Camera some of the students were already familiar with it and were eager to show how to use it which engaged the rest of the students as well.

Keynote update

Here are a couple of things that I wanted to link to earlier but forgot. Both of these were shown at the keynote this morning. This has got to be one of the coolest things I have seen in a log time. Also here is an interesting card trick.

Practical Pedagogy: Web 2.0, Online Learning and Professional Development

This session did not end up being as beneficial as I thought it would be. Nothing against the presenter she did a very good job. It's just that there was not much of anything new for me to try out. I am sure that others in attendance found it useful though.

Blogging It's Elementary

This session was pretty interesting. Some similar things to other web 2.0 sessions thus far. Blogger, WordPress, Common Craft, Twitter... One new site that was featured was Diigo, which is a bookmark sharing application and made the reiterating of the other stuff worth it. Here is a link to the presenter's site.

Tools of engagement

The second session that I went to was Tools of Engagement. The main focus was using Google Tools and different ways that they can be used. Some of the tools that were showcased were: Google Book Search, ChaCha, Google Maps, and Google Docs. He spent a good amount of time showing different ways you can use the widgets in Google Maps and what other classes have done with them. He also focused on different collaborative ways that Google Docs can be used. Next up Blogging? It's Elementary.

K12 Learning 2.0

The first session that I attended this morning was K12 Learning 2.0. The presenter showed a few new tools that I had not heard of before that look interesting. New things I found: Jing, VoiceThread. Not so new things but still great: Animoto, Google Docs, and Common Craft. Here is a link to her wiki where she was presenting from. Up next welcome by Alan November and Ewan McIntosh's Key Note.

Stay Tuned

Stay Tuned for updates from the BLC July 15-18. You can also follow @SteveBLC on Twitter.