NECC Summary

This document is the summary report for this year’s conference. Thinking about what’s most readable, I decided to do a little differently. I’ll summarize all five days in a paragraph or two here, and then if you wish you can look for the detailed notes, which are more “bullet style” but have specific tools and links as well as as many comments as I could cram in while I was typing with my laptop and tweeting. Caveat emptor!
After note — for the sake of readability, I broken down each post by day — that way the documents won’t be too far apart from the information that refers to them.

Tuesday June 30
(detailed notes with more info and links at end – this is just a summary)

The first event of the day was a pro and con discussion/debate on the topic of bricks and mortar. This was hosted by NPR’s Robert Siegel and was provocative although at times didn’t really address reality in my mind. not surprising to me, Cheryl Lemke had the best statements to make, reasoned, research-based, realistic. Her session later that day, of course was just as excellent. By contrast, Scott McLeod’s presentation the day before on disruptive technologies did much better job of portraying (what I believe is) the looming crisis in education due to technologies disruptive influence. The video of the session can be viewed here: http://bit.ly/13Bvc2

The first session I attended was Kathy Schrock’s “winning strategies for handling information overload” – Does this woman sleep?
As always, she was well prepared and had a lot of great advice. (I am trying to get the slides from the presentation so to make sure I didn’t miss anything, it was a pretty whirlwind presentation, she covered a lot of ground in one hour)
she was first going over strategies for managing e-mail overload, key advice — switch from pop to IMAP
she talked to the bit about networks — in particular she had reviewed a bunch of different models at some specific recommendations — these went to buy for me to transfer here hopefully I will believe this if I can get the slides from a presentation.

She then went on to talk about smart phones and waxed eloquent on the iPhone — as an owner of every version of this phone since it was released, I couldn’t agree more. A fabulous piece of technology, well-designed, state-of-the-art, visionary. we take it for granted now just two years after it was released and expected every new phone to do what this can do. Need I say more?Her YouTube video in tribute of the iPhone is in her notes

to manage just email she mentioned the email peek- cute device

she also mentioned a device called Chumby –
this is a great little device that keeps all of your social network in gadget/widget stuff off your computer. Touchscreen, 3 inches one button — on/off – simple fun and useful. Retails for under $180 — I gotta get me one of these!

she then went on to talk about a bunch of web 20 tools for things like social networking, blogging, etc. edmodo, diigo, Google docs, ether pad, etc.
here is a provocative one — Foxmarks- for Firefox, maintain bookmarks on one computer, and it shares with all the others that are subscribed to it. This would seem a wonderful strategy for computer lab, so that a librarian/resource person could maintain a set of bookmarks on their computer, and have all of the lab computers subscribe to their foxmarks. to take a closer look at this one…
she posted a website that has links for all of the tools she talked about, as well as a pdf of her presentation here:
http://kathyschrock.net/score/

Gail Lovely’s session
top ten sites for early learners
I believe Gail Lovely is a fantastic resource for elementary education. In this session she spent about three minutes each on 10 tools that you are powerful examples of technology in elementary education. her website does a fantastic job explaining this so I’ll just put the link here: http://glovely09.wetpaint.com/page/TopTen+for+Young+Learners
her general websites are:
http://www.gaillovely.com/
http://glovely.wetpaint.com/

tools mentioned: vocaroo, simplybox, kerploff, yakpak, gloggster, animoto, skype, voicethread, blogs, wikis

Cheryl Lemke, The Metiri Group
The Ripple EffectYes
once again, Cheryl showed why she is unique (well her and Ed Coughlin) in not just talking about technology education, but using research as the focus for both understanding and having a conversation about appropriate uses of technology. Certainly others rely on the research and some folks like Chris Dede are doing the research, but the combination of work her group does in her abilities to ariculate it is always refreshing.
she started her talk by using the research from the November 2008 research white paper by Mazuko Ito et al funded by the MacArthur foundation titled “living and learning the media”. This paper alone was worth attending the session for, as her group made available on their website for download and it is a phenomenal read!
In her presentation, Cheryl points out that teens use the social side of the web for two overlapping but distinct phenomena — the friendship side of the web that they don’t want adults part of, and the learning side of the web which adults can be part of But not necessarily.
She also talked a bit about truth and fiction on multitasking, talk about lesson design using Web 20 tools and what it means to engage deep learning.
She talked about the importance of trends in collaboration and about powerful ways to make online collaborative learning more effective (one example: recent national study shows that in a one-hour class period, only 1.7 minutes are for sustained, engaged conversation with adolescents)
she finished by talking about specific tools and activities that she thinks support the research on learning and are effective.
Her presentation notes are located here:
http://www.metiri.com/presentations/NECC09-Lemke.html
phenomenal!