www.wordle.net

What an interesting little web application. It creates word clouds from a list of text that you paste in. Quite a few options for fonts (interesting font names) and colour pallettes. This is very use for presentation slides and would creat interesting word lists for any school project.

Now that it has come to an end IT is just beginning as we try to sift through the mountain of new knowledge and ideas for transforming learning.

The ideas were easy to come by in an environment like this bit now the hard work of building those ideas into working classroom practice begins. The theme words for this year were  Convene  Connect  Transform  and that theme was certainly evident throughout the conference. Global collaboration was given a large presence as were web 2.0 tools. If there was one message to take back it would have to be to capture and engage our students by moving education beyond the classroom walls. eTools for iLearners in a digital environment.

The exhibition hall was amazingly large making it very difficult to get around in between sessions. It was good opportunity to get comprehensive information about a great variety of products. The inventive presentation awards go to the Wii golf game, the mini bowling alley and the bucking bull – yes a full size bucking bull that you were challenged to ride!

Organising a conference for 20 000 people must be a difficult task, one which was handled superbly. I would thoroughly recommend this conference to any educator.

NECC 2009 will be held in Washington DC June 28 – July 1

Today began well with a trip underneath the Convention Centre for a sneak peak at what is happening at MIT. The presenter likened his job to being like a kindergarten child as his day allows him to : imagine – create – play – share – reflect – imagine. Sounds like a pretty good job. At NECC, MIT and  Lego launched WeDo which is an extension of robotics designed for K-2 students. They had had it running on MIT’s $100 laptop as well. The session was mainly devoted to Scratch which was something i wanted to learn more about. There is only one word for Scratch – Awesome. It may not look much on the surface but it contains a multitude of very powerful learning attributes. Apart from fostering creative and critical thinking to problem solve, projects can be shared to a central depository which currently holds 150 000 projects. Students share collaborate and improve on projects in very active community of users. All educators should seriously consider Scratch as part of their classroom toolbox.

Apple hosted a session on using podcasts to improve reading ability and showed some impressive stats from schools that have been using this approach. We mainly went through a “how to” using iTunes, whilst I would have preferred see examples of this process in action. Upon reflection it was probably more useful to use the limited time learning the skills to make it happen, so another very worthwhile session.

“HTML code wizardry”, using HTML to add functionality. Some would call it a hack some an enhancement but either way it was pretty cool stuff. Use a simple line of html to take control of an iPod, embed a floating head, video files and even a live video feed into Google Earth. As he said, kids are doing this sort of stuff so why shouldn’t we know how they do it. Embedding a video image through a place marker tag has enormous educational potential.

Next it was Ice cream time which seems to be be a last day tradition at NECC. Oversized choc nut drumstick type ice-creams – mmmmm.

The closing keynote “The Transformational Power of Social Media Technology” was presented by Idit Harel Caperton, founder of World Wide Workshop. She spoke about how “social networks, wikis and blogs are changing the informational, social, political and educational landscapes.”

The keynote this morning focussed on two educators who have mover from IT avoiders to global collaborators. They presented some very moving examples of the work their students had done with student in Sierra Leone. The story of how those students are adjusting from years of war and human rights violations including being used as child soldiers was very powerfully presented. The International Education and Resource Network is a valuable source for taking part in collaborative global projects. The keynote theatre was huge, think of the largest theatre/convention area you know and double it!

Back to the exhibition hall for a presentation by Thinkfinity.org. This is a free depository of resources for educators. Very American but with over 50 000 resources available there is still a lot for educators from other parts of the world.

Entitled “Student Podcasts as the English Curriculum” this session fell well short of expectation. A quick survey showed half the audience were GarageBand users and we were treated to how to use Audacity to make a sound file. Actually he did this very well within a curriculum context. The examples shown were good but fell a long way short of covering an English curriculum,  the session was really some examples of using audio to enhance learning within the English curriculum.

Another point is the popular misconception that by simply recording an audio file you have made a podcast. A great many people do not seem to realise that it is not the file but the sharing through the RSS feed that is the podcast.

Strangely enough mentions of Audacity, Photostory and Moviemaker are everywhere but barely a mention of the far superior Mac alternatives. Especially since no matter what room you look around  Macs are very prominent. I think the reason is that Mac users have had access to these programs for many years now so they have been there and done that while Windows users are only just discovering these great tools and the the tools mentioned above are the best available to them. If you have experienced the brilliance of GarageBand and the amazing power of the iLife suite of programs then you’ll know exactly what I mean.

A quick trip back to the exhibition hall and . . . remember Hyperstudio? Well the good folk at MacKiev have done a great job to reinvent it. The presentation was done by Roger Wagner himself and while it has a familiar look and feel there have been many enhancements. For those who know the quality of MacKiev products this is another job well done. Notably it will export as a web page complete with navigation and slide transition effects or as a podcast or to YouTube. Drag a folder of photos to the HyperStudio icon in the doc and it quickly creates a stack out of of photos ready to write on. There is a Photobooth style countdown when recording audio and integration with video. A product well worth looking at. 

Alan November gave an inspiring session on “Designing Global Assignments” . He started by asking some open ended questions which the 1000 people in the audience voted on using the Activ vote audience response system. This worked incredibly well and Alan was able to lead the discussion based on the results. One interesting result was that in a room full of teachers who voted to be innovative and creative most felt they were held back by their school systems. He shared a few tips and tricks on web searching before taking a large axe to traditional schooling. His options were creative and collaborative, using real examples of classes using these methods. 

Visit Kiva.org for an excellent alternative to donating money to needy countries.

Will Richardson’s “Online Communities for PD” provided some insightful assistance on setting up a network of resources for staff. Wikispaces and Ning were mentioned as was an example of where this has worked in a school district : abpc.wikispaces.com

Since global collaboration is a big buzzword I decided to spend the last session hearing about such a program. Rock our World has been going for several years now and the material presented was very impressive. www.rockourworld.org

A significant event occurred at NECC last night when Apple launched a K-12 section of iTunes U. Many highly regarded universities around the world are already contributing 60 000 files to iTunes U, now K-12 content comes on board through several US state initiatives. A logical next step would be the inclusion of international contributions, based on recent initiative releases this could be expected next year. iTunes is becoming a very cost effective one stop shop for recreational and educational video and audio content. A similar facility is being released for iPhone content.

Lucky me! The Fedex Courier Company has been “waiting for you since to contact FedEx” because British Insurance has deposited US$900 000 in West Africa for me. I just have to send a $162 Security Keeping Fee to a very official sounding person with a hotmail address. Hmmmm

Wow! Lucky me again for today I have won US$1 500 000 in an Italian lottery and I didn’t even have to buy a ticket?? I just have to send some nice person my bank account and pin number so they can deposit the funds in my account. Hmmm

How does anyone fall for these scamms – they are so obviously fraudulent I can’t believe anyone is taken in by them – but people are. With the ability to bulk email the entire Internet it only takes one gullible fool and the sender starts to rake in the cash.

Some scams however are very well crafted and very believable, so follow some general rules:

1. If something sounds too good to be true then it probably isn’t

2. You never win anything without entering

3. Official warnings of great catastrophe and impending doom are not sent via email.

4. NEVER giver out banking/credit card details – stranger danger for big kids.

5. Official organisations do not use hotmail, gmail addresses.

Before you play good samaritan and send your hard earned money to Africa to save the poor child who’s been chained to an elephant’s butt for the last 12 years check out the Urban Legends reference site www.snopes.com – you may be surprised what is and is not real.

Why not use Snopes to verify the water bridge in Germany for instance . . .

When my kids were little be aquired a rather large teddy bear which was forever known as Big Ted.

The TED I really want to talk about stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design. With origins way back in the early 1980’s, it is a conference that brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers. Unfortunately until recently I had never heard of it. Guess I don’t meet the above qualification. Whilst most of us mere mortals may never get to grace the TED conference floor, we can view the material presented there by visiting the TED website. TED’s title banner promises “Inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers” and it delivers just that. There is no education category but there is a lot of educational relevance throughout the site. I found “Do schools kill Creativity” by Sir Ken Robertson particularly interesting.

The files can also be downloaded in several formats.

Time Magazine has just awarded the iPhone this honour made more special by the list of inventions that were beaten into second place. I was lucky enough to be in Miami when the iPhone was released and hogged the use of one in an Apple store for an hour exploring the iPhone’s features (it won’t be seen in Australia until sometime in 2008). It really is quite an amazing piece of technology. As I left the store I realised that I had been so engrossed in its many features that I had not tried to make a phone call on it!

Time liked the look and feel of it, the fact that it will set a standard for other phones, that it is far more than a phone and that it can only get better (think about how the iPod has developed).

The iPhone sets new ground in digital convergence by packing so any features in such a small device and could really become a seriously useful educational tool. Based on the This Day in History widget, the good folk at MacKiev have created a version that runs on your iPhone. This is a step from running World Book on the iPhone which is a step away from using it as a powerful reference tool apart from its wen browsing capability. It has the potential to become the first truly educationally useful handheld computer.

In another development the article also mentions that last month Apple opened up the iPhone to anyone who wants to develop apps for it. Watch the iPhone take off like podcasting.

It’s very good to know that although time moves on, young adults will continue to find zany ways to have fun. As reported in our local paper yesterday, Flashmob is a growing movement around the world with Flashmob events have already taken place in major cities such as Tokyo, London, Madrid and New York. It is described as a sudden gathering of people who spontaneously perform something unified and unusual then disperse.

A local university student had the idea to bring this to Canberra. Advertised on Facebook, participants were to turn up at a prearranged venue (Floriade) with hidden pillows and upon a given signal a pillow fight was to erupt until a second signal when all participants were to disperse into the gathered crowd of onlookers. They then moved to a nearby shopping area and repeated the event. It was obviously a lot of harmless fun that would have really had onlookers wondering what was going on.

A video of the event is naturally on YouTube, just enter a search for Canberra Flashmob. Searching simply for Flashmob brings up rather a large number of hits.

As educators we are all well aware of the need to keep an open mind and not letting pre-conceived notions cloud our judgement. Having been indoctrinated with the TV view of New York I was never really keen to go there – that thinking was a mistake. It really is nothing like the image presented on TV. In fact it was a very impressive city. Spacious, crowded, vibrant and alive. Quite the opposite of the other US city we hear the most about, LA. Apart from Disneyland the best view of LA is the one in the rear view mirror.

New York offers such a great range of attractions. Spamalot on Broadway was hilarious in true Python style. The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island were fascinating. The view from the top of the Empire State building was everything expected. The Ground Zero museum was a very moving experience as was Strawberry Field in Central Park. New York is full of icons that must be visited. A last minute detour found us at the Ed Sullivan Theatre but the Hello Deli eluded us.

Riding the subway at midnight was perfectly safe as was every other second of our stay, perhaps the very obvious and plentiful police presence had something to do with that.

Would we go back? Definitely. Hopefully a future NECC will be the lure.