THERE IS NOTHING WRONG HERE

I went to the Christa McAuliffe Tech Conference yesterday for the first time. I usually go to the MassCUE tech conference, but I was in NM at the time. Will Richardson was the keynote and I have to admit I am a bit of a groupie. I don’t know where he gets the energy, traveling from workshop to conference must be tiring. With each workshop I have with Will I come away with a deeper connection with technology and education.

The ETLO workshops will be over soon and the real work of signing up and training other teachers will start. As I was communicating through the wiki with other members of the MA team I felt I was working on an island and wanted more personal connection with other edtech teachers. maybe we can get together this summer for a technology “camp” and emerse ourselves in tool and content. I feel like I am always wanting more time to sit and really work through ideas/connections/tools/curriculum so that it becomes second nature. That is the problem with the Edtech conferences, I get an hour with Will, he touches on a few basic concepts and I have a few notes with ideas, the next time I get real time to set with the ideas and tools may be a month later.

At least it is grist for the blog.

may all being find peace

I successfully completed a Skype video connection with my classroom in MA from NM. The ease of setting up Skype and the webcam is scary. Now the hard part, how to use this technology in the curriculum. A place to start would be to connect classroom within the Collab.

As we work on curriculum development we can identify teachers who have a “best practice” lesson already developed. As we all know , especially in SPED, trying to be an expert in all the curriculum areas is impossible. With Web 2.0 tools we can teach to our strengths and share them with students not in our classroom.

I want you to meet the new me Jaime Theas, my avatar in Second Life . I can be found at Eduisland II looking at all the new resources being built there. I am still a new citizen learning how to live in SL. I have had a passing interest in SL, but when I started reading Kevin Jarrett’s blog The Story of My “Second Life” I knew I had to become part of this community of educators. Kevin has been working with the teachers and students at Suffern Middle School as they explore the integration of SL and education.

Then there is Sloodle, a mashup between Second Life and Moodle.

Sloodle is a project to integrate the VLE platform Moodle with 3D immersive settings such as Second Life. Imagine a Moodle course that, if you wanted, could turn into a proper 3D interactive classroom with all your Moodle resources available to your students in the virtual world.

Many of you may have seen Karl Fisch’s Did You Know video, but did you know that he has created a trio of video about the past-present-and future of educational technology.

The first video is called What if and is about the historical resistance to using new technology in education.

The Did You Know? video is here as a streaming Flash video and here on YouTube.

The third video is called 2020 Vision. In this video Fisch is giving the keynote at the high school graduation in 2020. He looks back over how much the world has changed over the last 13 years.

When I received the flier about this symposium I was not sure I could go, but I am glad I did. I have been looking forward to this for 2 weeks. I have learned so much since the MassCUE Conference in November I wanted to touch base again with some of the same presenters from November. I have been reading Will Richardson’s book from cover to cover and was able to get get him to sign it. He has so much energy and want to spread the edtech message to everyone. I was able to reinforce many of the concepts Will introduced in November.
I was also able to get more out of Paul Colombo’s podcasting workshop, now that I know more about what he is doing and I am doing. The Digital Kids workshop was very informative also. Producing and publishing instructional digital videos is not diffcult and many students could do it.

The conversations around the table at lunch are always interesting. Comments about the lack of technology integration teacher training at the college level is an issue that not many people are addressing. It is assumed that a 21 year old new teacher will be tech savy, but that is not true. They may have a blog and a MySpace, but that does not mean they can use tech tools effectively in the classroom. More work to be done.

I have been thinking about how to integrate some of the ideas I have from the Symposium into the curriculum at Career Tech. I guess I need to find out what they do now. My feeling is not much other than use computers for word processing and graphics.