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!

Monday June 29

{{did not attend morning sessions, as I volunteered from 9-noon}}

I attended A session on Second Life in Education.
Since I arrived about halfway through the presentation they were already into the part where they were talking about sites and visiting them. A few of the sites they visited: the Alamo, which had been set up for last year’s conference in San Antonio. They went to a marvelous site for the war victims from Middle East were each soldier has a plaque or information about them. They visited genome island where you can do things like fly inside the cell and click on the parts to learn more about how they work. At that point the question came up on accuracy and it was agreed that teachers should help the students plan for the appropriate use of these sites by checking them in advance. I had a conversation later in the conference with Westley Field who is working with Linden labs to develop a more controlled easily accessible environment so that some of these issues won’t be as difficult.

I attended a session titled
“teachers learning in networked communities” this was a pilot program with a bunch of schools (U Washington, U Memphis, U Colorado Denver) to build an online community for supporting pre-service and student teaching. They chose the platform Tapped In which they recognized although it is still very old-school in its approach and its compliance with Web 20 protocols, still serve the basic need for them and building a community, having public and private areas, having file repositories, supporting synchronous and asynchronous conversation,etc. the program was very successful for them, however, once the need for the students to be part of the community ended, few stayed on. One of their goals had been to expand the site from her just true service teachers, but they still need to do more to understand and use professional who are not required to come to space. Of course, if we look at the research from Ito that was mentioned in Lemke’s presentation this year, the closer these tools aligned to the more personal networks to students use — things like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, the more likely we are to make the spaces inviting enough two continue to sustain conversation professionally. someone else from the University of Washington mentioned that they are looking at using elluminate as a tool to connect students together. (Mark’s personal feeling is that although this is a useful tool to support an online community, you can only be one piece as its synchronous nature doesn’t allow for the full opportunity of knowledge building that happens in asynchronous environments.)

The next session was with Scott McLeod

who maintains a website:
dangerously irrelevant
his goal for this topic was disruptive technologies — based on Christensen’s books and writings. This was a great presentation which was highly attended much to my surprise. Apparently even the most traditional of the public schools are beginning to understand that they need to look at new models of change. He first covered the ground that Christiansen had in his latest book and then talked about things schools need to do in order to survive. One of his points at the heart was the research and viewpoint that if schools don’t make dramatic change happen, they will struggle to change their organization. One model that he discussed was creating a new organization rather than trying to change the one that you currently have. This is much in line with our (MPI) initiative in the high school, where instead of trying to change all the school at once, we decided to try and innovate a school within a school with the hope that we would learn from that school what works and what doesn’t and make further determinations if we want to expand the size and reach. He finished with some insights, what schools should do, more detailed notes are located on the in the documents section listed below

my document repository (notes, slides, etc) here: