My Blog of Potential

After an overwhelming plunge into the exhibit hall, I slinked off to the Bloggers cafe again.  I saw someone typing on a beautiful laptop about the size of a large Nintendo DS – he said it was an ASUS 700 and it sold for about $300 – suddenly I have LAS (laptop acquisition syndrome for those of you who aren’t familiar with the musical equivalents MAS for mandolins and GAS for guitars).  I WANT one of those – after carrying my D610 around all day the chair massage store at Rivercenter was looking very tempting.  I saw someone demonstrate Weebly.com, an online webpage creating system, that I will explore further after I get home.  Another teacher showed how she was leveraging wikis and Pageflakes.com in her science class to motivate students who have placed out of the unit test to further their understanding and make contributions to the class.  Each lab group of 4 has a laptop and one login to the class Wiki, so they have to work together to make their groups contributions.  Pageflakes is a closed community social networking that teachers could use to both push assigments and leave feedback for their students.  AGain, something I’ll have to further explore.

After getting shut out of the seminar on 7 habits of Effective Technology Coordinators (dang it) I went instead to one on how to write for ISTE publications.  This was the first disappointment of the conference.  The presenters did a great job of explaining how to submit and what were the submission criteria and what was the time line, so I am not sure why I was not impressed – maybe because I was hoping somehow to magically hear them want something that I knew how to write about – not their fault, just a mismatch between what I wanted and what I got.

I made contact at the exhibit hall with a vendor who is in charge of the EPals blogs – a very valuable contact.  I spoke to her of my less than satisfiying experience with their tech support last spring and some of the challenges I’ve encountered in administering a school wide blog on Epals – she was very interested in my feedback and very receptive.  She asked me to contact her after the conference to further discuss this while they are developing their update to the blogs, and so I think maybe we will get some additional help configuring the blog to better meet our needs.  I also met a woman at the RenLearn booth where they had a great presentation promoting their Neos (the next generation of the Danas)- I’ll insert a cute picture later – they used the character Neo from the Matrix, Darth Vader, Emmot Brown (think Back to the Future) and Spock – a very memorable presentation.  She and I got to talking about the Danas and how they had becomed the orphans once Rennaissance Learning bought out AlphaSmart.  Turns out she used to work for Alphasmart and was very fond of the Danas.  I asked her if she still had access to the Dana usergroup or any of the training materials since I am looking for suggestions to get my teachers interested in using them more.  Jackpot!  She told me to email her after the show and she’d see what she could access and perhaps send to me from her own archives (another person like me who never cleans out her U drive).

Then I attended a concurrent session about leveraging the power of cellphones for learning.  Wow – what an electrifying idea.  You could use the cell phones to video-podcast (or audio for that matter), take digital pictures, poll the audience, many other ideas – I am really itching to get back to school and talk to my principal about revisiting our policy re-cell phones.

The final session was a roundtable about using digital portfolios for assessing technology skills.  While it didn’t really cover any new ground for me, I did crystallize a couple ideas for how we could implement and grade the portfolios.