NECC, Day 2 is Canada Day. Before I left for the convention centre, I sent out two tweets.
Paul has a quiz on his blog and Microsoft had a quiz on their site. What a nice day to Canada’s birthday. It was a nice lead-in to the opening keynote. Canadian educators Mali Bickley and Jim Carleton were interviewed by NBC’s Lester Holt. He interviewed the duo about the global collaboration projects their classes were participating in. Of particular interest is the support that their administrator gives them and the return is an increased return on EQAO scores. It doesn’t get much better than that. Using connections from iearn.org and myhero.com, they are able to bring character building and global awareness into their primary classes. Students polish their work knowing that they have a global audience. One particulary emotion moment came when one of their students adopted a truck driver as “My Hero” because he gave his life in order that others would live. The widow showed up at the school to meet the student who had made her husband his hero. It was tough to choke back the emotion. On the horizon, these teachers will bring a carbon calculator to their students to help them identify their footprint on the environment. The session certainly set the tone for the day and there were references to Canadian global awareness and compassion at later sessions. The whole interview was very professional and I suspect will be on an edition of The Today Show this weekend.
Had a nice chat with Ron, Harry, Beth, and David Warlick. I complimented David on his presentation yesterday. It really was good. We had a nice chat about Personal Learning Networks and immigrants to Canada.
There was a longish break before the next set of concurrent sessions and so I headed back to the vendors. This time, I was intrigued by some of the sub-compact laptops that were on the floor. OLPC has been good for breaking the mold of what a laptop computer could be. I think this is going to grow and set a standard for us in the upcoming years. One unit claimed a battery life of 6 hours. You can’t ask for more in a regular school.
Hidden well in the maze of sessions was my next one. “What Effective Computer-Using Educators Know about Teaching: An International Perspective”. Geoff Powell from Australia, Peter Skillen from Canada, and Gary Stager from the US formed a panel where they gave us some thoughts about best practices. I can always count on Gary Stager for a good line or two and he made an interesting observation. When interviewing for teaching jobs, if someone has summer camp experience, they go to the top of the list because they’ve lived with kids and hopefully understand them better. I’d never thought of that. While I had never done summer camp, my summers involved teaching swimming lessons and lifeguarding. I wonder if that would count. Some other observations “Good teachers scare kids (sometimes)”, “If you’re going to make your school wireless, don’t forget the courtyard outside”, “Always ask deep questions”, and then there’s a comment that makes one of my employer’s belief statements. “All teachers should be able to explain what it is that they do and why they do it”. Makes so much sense, but does it happen all the time? I also learned a new use for Google Earth. It’s called “Dipping”. Use Google Earth to find a nice big swimming pool in someone’s backyard and get the gang and go for a midnight dip. Hmmmm.
Alan November had the big theatre for his presentation about “Designing Rigourous and Globally Connected Assignments”. Alan gave the audience the challenge to make some significant changes this year. Remember that whatever you “say” on the web could conceivably be heard around the world. Some things to learn.
- Learn the grammar and the syntax of the internet
- Screencast your homework
- Assign jobs to kids so that everyone’s work has value
- Have a Scribe team and develop class notes as a community
- Add some value to the world – make a contribution to Wikipedia…
A great presentation. Unfortunately, it ran over and I had a commitment so I had to sneak out at about the 65 minute mark. The big thing thought was that we all got a copy of Alan’s Book “Web Literacy for Educators”. It will be a good read on the flight home.
Next, Will Richardson and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach talked about the creation of Online Learning Communities. Sheryl shared a great line “Change is always premature”. Got to remember that one. Stories were shared of some work that they had done with schools using Personal Learning Communities and some of the face to face and electronic means that they used to promote the essence of the communities. Another great quote “None of us are as good as all of us”. You can check out the results of their work illustrating what they consider to be best practices at http://abpc.wikispaces.com. And, Sheryl uses Flock as a browser. What a great sign of someone who understands community. They also shared a rubric for acquisition of the skills.
- Know Nothing
- Newbie
- Explorer
- Path Finder
- Power User
- Know Everything
with descriptors for each level, of course.
Finally, Hall Davidson finished the day with a talk about cell phones in the classrooms. We, of course, all poked fun at schools that ban cell phones. At least in North America. This is a phenomenon that’s not going to go away so we need to figure out what we’re going to do about it. Some interesting cell phone trivia – on the planet, there are 3billion cell phones and 6.6billion people. In perspective, there are 850million persona computers. I thought this was cool…there are 30 countries that have more cell phones that people!
Hall then took us through a thoroughly enjoyable look at some things that you can use a cell phone for.
Jott – instant transcription
GCast – create your own podcasts by telephone
We also did a poll like you would with your hand held classroom response units only by cell phone through PollEverywhere
Get food information by texting to 34381
Search Google by texting to 466453
Access Google Calendar by texting to 48368
The folks from Kurzweil have a cell phone with a reader…
And, there’s a cell phone that is also a projector to display contents on a wall.
And, of course, your phone can play mp3, videos, do slideshows, take pictures, and even make telephone calls.
Apple Canada had a reception for Canadian attendees and it was good to renew acquaintances. Then, the compulsory walk along the Riverwalk. Interesting to note that Discovery Education had reserved an entire floor for a reception.
One more day… I can’t wait. This has been a great two days so far.
Tags: NECC, Professional Development
