My Blog of Potential

What a day! I started the day with three main goals – learn about assessing student technology proficiencies, learn about best practices in teaching technology literacy, and learn about how to better plan with teachers to integrate technology in their lessons – I feel like I really batted 1000 on all counts.

The first concurrent session I attended was Information Literacy: Concrete Strategies to Bring Students Aboard!by Eric LeMoine. He discussed digital literacy – both from the standpoint of knowing how to more effectively locate information by using better search techniques, how to teach students to evaluate websites, and how to better manage information overload by using rubrics and checklists during every phase of the project to hold students accountable for their own choices. One of the websites he cited as a great example to use when teaching evaluation was DHMO.org – a parody site that science students should be able to evaluate and realize is not really true. He was a big fan of trackstar and rubistar – which is encouraging to me since I really promote those with my teachers. A phrase he kept using when discussing helping students manage their projects was ‘responsible use of glitz’ – for example when discussing with students how much animation or sound to use in their powerpoints. He also discussed having students create their presentations in outline view first, before allowing them to do any of the visual stuff.

The second session, Assessing Students’ and Teachers’ Technology Skills: NETS as Benchmarks , was hosted by ISTE’s Mila Fuller and featured representatives from Learning.com, PBS Teacherline, and Certiport discussing methods of student and teacher technology skills assessment. Both student assessment products are online – which give me concern because once again the issue of putting student directory information out there rears its ugly head – but the positive aspect was that each of the assessments could be administered at the beginning of the year, in modular form – so we could assess the word processing, for example through language arts one period, and give the language arts teachers a target to aim at, which assessing Internet searching skills through Science another day, and then give them some goals to teach the students in that subject. The Learning.com product was more generic and less application specific than the other, but since the Certiport is very MS Office specific, and that’s what we use, it would work out OK for us anyway. The PBS teacherline was referring more to ways of assessing teacher technology proficiency, so I must admit I kind of tuned out at that point since we are not in that market. I was a little disgruntled because the session description said they’d discuss reporting requirements for NCLB and that was never mentioned, so that is something I will have to pursue elsewhere.

The third concurrent session,
Truly Technologically Integrated Planning for Teaching and Learning, dealt with rethinking how we plan to integrate technology into classroom lessons. The presenters have a very good handle on how teachers plan lessons, and how they tend to choose a pet technology, and then find a way to shovel the lesson into that technology. They suggest instead that the lesson should be planned in a much more content and student-centered fashion, working from the learning goals to the learning activities to the assessments to finally the technology resources that may be needed or appropriate. From a teaching standpoint I totally agree. From the standpoint of trying to find ways to get all our technology applications TEKS covered in the course of a school year, I’m not as sure. On the other hand, I’m beginning to wonder if we’re not really being driven by the necessity of covering our TEKS into doing exactly what we didn’t want to do – teach technology for the sake of technology (because we have a TEK we need to cover) instead of integrating it as appropriate to the content.

I spent some time on the exhibit hall floor – it was pretty overwhelming – but I did come away with some interesting ideas to share with Rick (Scratch for programming animation) and information for Glynnis on the lifelike baby for health classes. I saw the $10 USB stick drives too – I’ll talk to Brenda about maybe trying that as a fundraiser for WMS technology.

I also saw some good poster sessions about using Web 2.0 for professional development – I’m still not sure how to develop that idea, but I can feel some glimmerings starting to swirl around in my head. One very cute site someone had, that I can see a lot of potential use (and misuse) was Blabberize.com

We moved to a different hotel tonight – the room was not ready on time, which was a bummer, but they did have free food, drinks, and ’sortaritas’ at dinner time. They called them frozen margaritas, but the things were neon bluegreen colored and didn’t really taste quite sour enough to be a margarita, so I called them ‘Sorta-ritas’. But the price was right and at the end of a long day, the cool slushy drink was refreshing. The room here is very nice – large suite with full kitchen, so I don’t have any compaints except that for some reason the wireless we can pick up doesn’t like my laptop. It lets Jennifer’s laptop login (both the PC and the Mac) but not mine. Guess I’m just not special enough, but she’s being kind enough to let me use her PC while she Macs around. On to day 3 tomorrow.