Tag: necc02

Next to CNN and any channel showing sporting events, TechTV is possibly my favorite television channel. The information density is not great, but I pick up something every now and then. The Screen Savers program has a good web site and archive (TechTv) that often provides me relevant information. A recent program focused on satellite imagery and explained how you can access images of your own community (program notes).

My wife and I have an agreement about shopping trips. She goes shopping and I go to Barnes and Noble to drink coffee and look for books. We both like things this way.

I tend to get ideas when I have the time to sit around, look through books, and drink coffee. During my most recent “shopping trip”, I started looking at books about blogging and I ended up purchasing two (“we’ve got blog” by Perseus Publishing and “We blog: Publishing online with weblogs” by Bausch, Haughey and Hourihan). Why not start a blog about issues in technology and education? This would not be my first blog (Grabe NECC blog), but this would be my first serious attempt to maintain a blog over an extended period of time.

Here is my idea. Cindy and I are now between books. We always hope we have the opportunity to write the next edition. Rather than wait to find out if this will be the case, I tend to start collecting ideas and in formation immediately. I use some of this information in developing our web site (Grabe book site), but there are many ideas and resources that simply do not fit with structure of the web site. Why not use a blog to retain this information for personal use and share some of this content with others?

This blog was created as a record of some of our experiences at NECC. Blogs are organized chronologically and the more recent entries appear at the top of the page. This blog allowed us to learn a little about how blogs work and to consider how blogs might be used as an educational communications tool. Comments on the creation of a blog appear in the entries generated during the first couple of days (see bottom of this page).

Global Schoolhouse sponsored a session on online collaborative learning. The purposes of the session were to introduce the audience to the resources of online collaboration and to provide some examples from the registry of more than 800 online projects Global Schoolhouse maintains.

Guest presenter at the GSN session was Karen Eini winner of the 2002 Shared Learning Award is responsible for developing and maintaining Friends and Flags a project dedicated to multicultural learning. Karen presented her structure for successful online collaborative projects.

Children’s Software Review offered a presentation based on their process for identifying the most innovative learning products of the year. The specific products that were discussed were used to illustrate the design features the review committee looked for in identifying quality products deserving recognition,. An interesting side light of the presentation involved comments about the difficulties involved in delivering quality learning experiences online.

Finally, we had an opportunity to catch up with the people from Tech4Learning. We have previously commented on several of their products (MediaBlender and Claymation) and spent time at the conference learning a little bit about VideoBlender (product for student video projects). Cindy and Melinda Koch have known each other for some time and we follow what Tech4Learning does because of their focus on support for student projects. We appreciate their willingness to allow us to use these pictures and wish we knew the entire cast of characters.

Melinda Koch of Tech4Learning

David Wagner and Tech4Learning Colleague

Today was the final day of the conference. I have a number of final comments to make in finishing this blog, but I am going to spend time tomorrow on the trip back putting this material together.
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nA few words to recognize our sponsor. Cindy and I spend some time consulting with a technology innovation challenge grant awarded to the Grand Forks Schools and the Dakota Science Center. This organization attended NECC to promote the resources NatureShift makes available. The following pictures are from their convention booth – note the URL for the grant www.natureshift.org.

One of the more popular demonstrations in the NatureShift booth involved robot kits allowing the creation of BoBots. See the NatureShift site for details.

Blogs can be community projects. Blogger allows the blog administrator to “invite” other participants. These individuals are sent an invitation by email and establish a username and password. These individuals can sign in and submit contributions. They are unable to edit other entries to the blog. The administrator can edit (including remove) any entry. Because the NECC blog is stored on my personal server, an entry submitted by a participant would be stored by Blogger.Com until I (administrator) upload the blog to my server by FTP. I am certain how this would work when serving the blog from the Blogger site. I am guessing that all participants would be able to immediately update the blog.