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.

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.