John Branson from CCIU presents on Second Life. CCIU uses it as a professional development delivery platform of sorts.

Actually quite a few of the audience were familiar and even had SL avatars.

Linden Labs adds 22 servers per week.
140 businesses

Mentioned ISTE, EduIslands, InfoIsland, NASA, NOAA, etc.
Provided a nice overview of the SL ‘basics’

Demo of the CCIU home in SL.
covered basic movement and avatar control, HUD layout and controls
Lot of interest in SL
communication

interest in economy, controls, archiving presentations,
time spent in SL

Search functions
Tour to Vassar School of Art - The Cistine Chapel model
Tour to NOAA

Intersting discussion regarding intellectual property rights and the validity of information.

Well its that time of year again. Time to get crammed into tiny little rooms with hundreds of fellow geeks and geekettes like sardines in the can. Time to feel the palpable love for technology. Time for the most massive Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo and Conference ever. Wow there’s a lot of people here.

Today started with a great, relaxing and funny keynote from David Pogue who pontificated on the comglomeration of gadgets and gizmos

My first break-out session was also presented by David Pogue, called something like David’s Gadget Funhouse. A walk through a variety of the latest and greatest in geek toys.

Grandcentral.com - allows you to have calls coming into your one cellphone routed to mutiple devices.
Skype phone -
Popularity Dialer - funny site you can schedule a recorded call to your cell phone (think get out of a bad date)
WiFi Cameras -
Slingbox - set up your home pc to broadcast to net. $250. No fees.
Netflix “Watch Now” - with netflix subsrcription , unlimited online movie viewing
Speech recongmition software

Dr. Willard Daggett
Rigor and Relevance -

“Excellence and equity are in conflict”.
“When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.”

Suggests that we have a fundamental organizational problem delivering authentic instruction in Amreican schools. We just aren’t set up to provide enhanced application of the learnings. We are set up to meet Bloom’s taxonomy but only with minimal application of that knowledge.

Develop a network of educators sharing lesson ideas for connecting knowledge to the applications.

Do a needs assessment - begin with the end in mind (”Learning Criteria”).
Then look at the 8 components

Learning criteria - they are the actions that help you achieve what you believe in.

Direct correlation between student engagement and core learning

“Don’t confuse obediant students and motivated students”

Make change evolutionary, not revolutionary. Change should be gradual. Not immediately manditory.

What are the STRETCH indicators - credits earned (senior year is a blow off for students, no rigorous requirements).

PA is 47th for required graduation credits. (New York is 48)

If we don’t stretch kids, then we will never achieve the core.

Personal Skill Development

140 million pre-schoolers in India today.

Good session yesterday from representatives of Nasa/Goddard that I wasn’t able to post at the time. They have a tool called My Nasa Data. Very cool online tool that provides “micro-sets” of data that students can work with. Includes leveled data sets for elementary/intermediate/advanced. Includes a science glossary and pulls its data from a range of satellites including weather data. Students can find science project ideas and teachers can browse through tons of pre-developed lesson plans. Also mentioned a ‘mentor network’ where users can sign up to be a mentor or can ask a question at the website. Check it out.

Presented by Cynthia Hyland and Miguel Santa from William Penn SD

William Penn uses blendedschools to better differentiate instruction for all students in an affordable way. Using some credit recovery, or extra credit. They provide three models - full time, summer school and blended (part time). THeir blended option allows the students to take ONE class through blackboard. Summer program brings the students into the school building and runs 6 to 8 weeks.

They use the Wimba LiveClassroom all day. The students are expected to be in the LiveClassroom 8-3. Available all day for support and monitoring. Clases are held in real time. (I wonder how they schedule it - how are teachers allocated? Must assign blended as a specific duty or in place of traditional?) They indicate that it provides a greater opportunity for students to freely ask questions of the teacher either within the classroom or through a private message. IN the traditional classroom students are sometimes afraid to ask questions.

There are a couple of cool new features in the LiveClassroom including the ability to either manually or automatically move students into ‘breakout’ rooms and a couple of new response tools. Also has built in video. I don’t recall if that feature was in the previous generation or not. The video actually tracks the person talking so when someone hits the talk video its their video that gets pushed out to the other users.