Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Tuesday Sessions July 1st!

Today started early! After having a bug crawl on me about 4:00, I was up for the day looking through the immense list of choices for sessions. Have found you have to get there early as they do fill up and you might not get in to what you want.

First Session: KeyNote Speaker

Jim Carleton and Mali Bickley are Canadian educators leveraging the collaborative power of technology to help their students help others worldwide.

Aided by the generous support of NBC's education division, Jim and Mali offer a multimedia-rich, onstage dialogue featuring their inspirational experiences and can-do insights on how they have transcended traditions in education to create dynamic, engaging learning environments. Jim and Mali will be interviewed by by prominent NBC journalist Lester Holt. Holt is the weekend anchor for NBC Nightly News, and is also co-anchor of the weekend edition of TODAY.

http://www.icue.com/ by NBC- website that students and teachers can sign up to gain access to NBC News archives On-demand along with many other items

Connecting globally is the big thing and the archives look fantastic as resources for teachers.

Second Session: Apple From A-Z

What a surprise to see ALI back up and running! Our teachers taking TTL in 2000-2001 posted lesson plans to the Apple Learning Interchange as part of their TTL class. At that time, Apple was working with SD and gave us access to their server for this.

They have now added itunes U and some fabulous blogs to download and listen to in itunes.

Third Session: Football Field of Exhibits 2

Lots of good sessions to sit through in the exhibit hall. I think the next technology purchase for our school should be some $300-$500 laptops for elementary. I have been demoing them and am impressed. They are small, but pretty powerful. There are quite a few versions of the smaller laptops.

"Intel has created an ultra-low-cost laptop for school children in emerging markets. The "ClassMatePC" is available with Linux or Windows XP, comes with an "educational feature set," and is part of a program in which Intel plans to invest $1 billion over the next five years.
Intel describes the ClassMatePC as a rugged device with features similar to mainstream PCs. It's based on a mobile Celeron processor and is equipped with local (flash-based) storage and a built-in wireless network interface. Additionally, the unit sports a water-resistant keyboard and comes with a theft-control feature based on a network-issued digital certificate."
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4529910170.html

CSpan Bus was here. I went on and talked to them about bringing the CSPAN election bus to Garretson for our kids. Bob and I had seen the bus in Sioux Falls, so think his students might like to see it, especially with an election year! They also have a new resource for teachers.
http://c-spanclassroom.org/
This has downloadable and searchable videos, is standards based content and has a liberal copy right policy to allow educators to record and keep CSpan produce programming for classroom use. It's free and looks like a great resource for teachers!

Atomic Learning, Nettrekker are both here and showing what is new. Atomic learing has a desktop search which I will install for all desktops this fall to quickly find tutorials.

Supper with ProQuest

Ginny, Misty and I were invited to a supper with Proquest, a subscription database for online research resources. It took us 3 hours to get through all 6 of the courses.

Course 1: Appetizers--bacon wrapped quail legs, shrimp cocktail, crab pinchers, cold salmon, and escargot
Course 2: Soup--chilled passion fruit melon soup with pepper!
Course 3: Salad with balsamic vinaigrette and pine nuts
Course 4: To clense the palate Kiwi sorbet
Course 5: Main Course--choice of larger steak, smaller steak and shrimp (which I had), lamb chops, or salmon all served with garlic mashed potatoes and steamed asparagus
Course 6: Coffee and Dessert--I had the crème brulee but could have had cheesecake

Came back and sat in the hot tub, which wasn't very hot!

Great way to end the day!

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