Lloyd Onyett - Indiana University of Pennsylvania
aka Komputer Merlin

IUP has several islands, incl. Crimson Island and Archaeology Island

About 75 teachers at IUP involved to some degree.
Training education students to use SL.

Very general overview of SL using powerpoint primarily

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

I’ve been digging Google Docs for some time now. Google Docs is an awesome free online alternative for Office and allows you to construct documents, spreadsheets and presentations online, easily collaborate on those documents, and export to an Office readable format. All good.

However, I recently started playing with Zoho Suite and I’m convinced that it is head and shoulders above Google Docs in terms of features and usability. Zoho (still all web based and free) has the spreadsheet, document and presentation tools, but further includes a whole bunch of other stuff. Here’s a rundown on what’s included…

Zoho Writer
Zoho Sheet
Zoho Show
Zoho Meeting
Zoho Notebook
Zoho DB & Reports
Zoho Planner
Zoho CRM
Zoho Creator
Zoho Wiki
Zoho Chat
Zoho Mail
Zoho Business
Zoho Polls

Wow! Talk about making a great run at competing with Google’s dominance in the web app market - and doing a good job at it. But wait! That’s not all. They seem to have a series of services and browser plugins available too (beyond those mentioed above). Some of these are free, some have a subscription level that expands the feature set available. I can tell you that I will defiantely be using Zoho in 2008!

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.