My Brain Hurts

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