Forest Park's March Madness

MacWorld

I am heading to MacWorld today and plan to publish via iPhone. Already off to a bad start with the rescheduling of David Pogue to Wednesday.

MacWorld 2008 Educator Academy - The How

The How session notes

Looking forward to hearing how to deploy new systems.  However, I started my day with a Keynote from David Pogue of the NYTimes - an excellent choice.

Macworld Live! with David Pogue

Feature Presentations  9:00am - 10:00am      West Hall 3010

Speakers:                  

• Donna Dubinsky–CEO,Numenta, Inc.
• David Pogue–Author & "State of the Art" Columnist,The New York Times
• Dag Spicer–Senior Curator,The Computer History Museum

Move over Letterman, Leno and Conan - New York Times technology columnist and Mac industry luminary David Pogue returns to Macworld to host our very own talk show. The news of the day, exciting guests, David’s famous song parodies and plenty of surprises await you as Macworld Live returns to San Francisco!

      

MacWorld 2008 Educator Academy - The Why

The Why Session Notes

3 excellent sessions

MacWorld 2008 Educator Academy

Event Notice

Kicked off this year's macWorld by attending the John Lennon Bus event Tuesday night sponsored by the education group at Apple.

Scratch

Just read an article by Warren Buckleitner in the NY TImes about an exciting new creativity tool from MIT's Media Lab called Scratch.  It is a drag-and-drop programming tool (PC/Mac) that is being made available for free thanks to Intel and the National Science Foundation.

ADHD and Hall Davidson

Hall Davidson was the 6th and final speaker at the K-12 Symposium and in his inimitable style gave a hyperactive presentation on myriad uses of iPods in the classroom titled The MegaVCR:  Media and More in Your Pocket. 

Download MegaVCRhandoutMW.pdf

Came away with some really neat ideas of how to use this portable technology in the classroom.  Hall's central theme was the iPods ability to house a variety of media including:

• Videos
• Movies
• PowerPoints (Advanced Google Search select .ppt file format)
• Software Output
• Flash
• Music
• Photos

that could be passed between classrooms.  Videos can be added to the iPod after they have been imported into iTunes.  If the file is already in mpv4 format, select Add to Librabry.  Other assest will have to be converted by right-clicking the video then selecting Convert Selection for iPod.  Purchased an iPod cradle with s-video inputs based on his recommendation. I would like to try this out in Jon Ford's room as a way to show powerpoint presentations.

K-12 Market Symposium

According to the extract from the macworldexpo site:

Educators across the globe have embraced technology as a catalyst for enhancing teaching and learning. Join expert educators as they demonstrate current applications of technology to engage students, enhance achievement and impact learning in new and powerful ways. Teachers, administrators, school IT and tech coordinators, parents and students are all welcome to attend this event, co-produced by Computer Using Educators (CUE).

which is the same statement used to introduce the list of speakers last year, so it was not necessarily geared to Monica Beglau's mind-numbing lack of intensity as she lead the speakers in her keynote address.  Oh this is a painful beginning.  10 teachers from FUSD came to the Symposium based on my recommendation . . . I’m recording the sloth-like pace of Beglau's Mr. Roger's presentation style to illustrate my point.  This woman is not presenting to educators thirsting for new ideas; rather she is presenting at a board of education meeting – OUCH!  I think she is trying to relate the impact technology–rich schools have on student performance on standardized testing – woo-hoo    S o c r a t i c   q u e s t i o n i n g  . . . t h i n k  a b o u t    i t.  Good time for me to work on my syllabus.

MacWorld 07

Foggy day on the waters as I cross the bay on the ferry.  The Ferry Building appears in outline as sunlight tries to bust through the dense fog.

I’m attending the K-12 Market Symposium today at MacWorld and looking forward to a day filled with enriching ideas.  Last year saw the renewal of Apple's commitment to education when they brought back the K-12 Market Symposium.  When reviewing the speakers on the macworldexpo  site, I was surprised to see such a substantial change in the roster of speakers – with the exception of Hall Davidson, all speakers had changed and seemed oddly familiar, with David Warlick a featured speaker.  I enjoyed hearing Warlick last year and attribute to him my interest in Web 2.0 technologies but I was looking forward to some new ideas.  Turns out the online roster I was looking at was for 2006 – dope!  I am looking forward to seeing Bernie Dodge from SDSU and discussing my course at CSUEB with him.

Wikis in Education

Wikis are fully editable websites that present an excellent opportunity for online collaboration, also known as computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL).  I have been reviewing some research looking for evidence of how to integrate wikis into the learning space  Four factors stood out in an online article written by Naomi Auger, Ruth Raitman, and Wanlei Zhou on the ASCILITE site:
 

• promoting peer interaction and fascilitation of the sharing and distribution of knowledge and expertise amongst a group of learners (Lipponen, 2002).
• enabling students to share authority in student-centered exercises giving them the responsibility for building knowledge (Myers, 1991).
• reflecting the shared knowledge of the learning group.
• enabling the exchange of ideas to facilitate group interaction.

continued

Third Grade Thoughts on the Lab

As a test project, I created this podcast using interviews with third graders posing the oft asked question, "what do you learn in the computer lab anyway?"  I edited the interviews in Garageband 3.

Download third_grade_thoughts.m4a