BLC Day 2

I did not have much time in between sessions today to do some write ups. So here is what I got from the sessions today.

Session: Safe Schools in a Web 2.0 World

It ended up being really a sales pitch for Lightspeed Systems Content Filtering system. Which is actually not all bad. It seems like a decent system and it looks to do what they say it does. One of the little tidbits of information that I got from the session was learning the being CIPA compliant basically means trying to protect students from anything that might be considered adult or hate material.

Next up the HTC team had a meeting with Alan November

He had many different ideas that I thought were great. Here are a few:

Teachers should bring two students with them to technology trainings so that they can learn as well.
A team of students should write up a code of ethics for web use
A DVD should be created and given out to new students as an introduction to our district
A teacher should come up with a list of the 10 most difficult concepts to learn and present them to students to see what they come up with for ways of teaching the concept.

The next session was Beyond E-mail with Jeff Utecht

Some decent ideas here about communicating school information rather than through monthly type newsletters by online video, social networking sites, texting, and just the web in general.
He also gave a good reason for using a blog over a wiki and that is that a blog is more linear, the new material is always on top you do not have to look through the entire page to find the edits.
He also talked about using Google Analytics for tracking visitors to your site.

Then their was a special Keynote done by David Kirkpatrick

It was a really interesting presentation on the development of technology and how it is affecting the entertainment industry and really people in general. He had plenty of interesting statistics but here are a couple that stuck out to me:

75% of college graduates will never finish another book but will start many

In 2000 46% adults used Internet /, 73% of kids 12-17 years old Now : adults 76 %, kids 93%