Snacks 58–NECC2007!
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007
Howdy and happy summertime, ya’ll.
As you may have learned by now, S4theB! can get a little erratic in the summertime, the victim of its producer’s schedule gone Attention Deficit as the structure offered by the academic school year’s busy calendar evaporates with the last bell of the last day of the school year.
NEVER FEAR! I have been traveling a bit, down to the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC), hosted by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), in Atlanta, Georgia. Thank the powers-that-be for acronyms, since I don’t have to type those long names anymore!
My time in Atlanta was so productive it’s taken me this long to sort out what I wanted to share from the recordings and pictures I brought back, and I’ve come up with three short snippets of three of my most favorite talks:
1) Peggy Sheehy describes part of her work with her teenagers at Suffern Middle School in New York. If you don’t know about Second Life, check out its website (after listening to the podcast!). Then google it this way, [”Second Life” education], and that will help you begin to understand the potentials this Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE)–and others like it–offer to engage the otherwise possibly unengageable student. There are some videos I took of Peggy’s presentation with more stunning curriculum description available at my own Second Life blog.
2) Kathy Schrock (previously interviewed on an early S4theB!) spoke with upwards of a thousand, maybe 2 or 3 thousands (I don’t have the capacity of the full-to capacity ballroom in which she shared her presentation) of educators about just what Web 2.0 is and what it will be. Her presentation slides (many featuring her Second Life Kathy Dryburgh avatar standing in front of an inworld podium with a presentation slide behind her–verrrry interesting) and all the resources she shared are at her website.
and 3) Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Chris Dede asks a question (you’ll have to listen to hear it!) that might keep you thinking well into next week (whatever week it is that you’re listening to this!).
The single song in the podcast this week (notwithstanding my closing “Snacks4theBrain!” “unjingle”) is from the amazingly talented Bill deRoth, a stellar denizen of the Podsafe Music Network. Go listen to more: Support him buy buying a few songs, or his wonderful album, “Liquid Light.”
If you want to learn more about my time at NECC2007 (”the conference that never ends…”), visit my personal blog and my personal Second Life blog. Also, I’ll be spending quality time with a dozen of my favorite people, my colleagues at University School of Nashville, the week of July 23-27, exploring Web 2.0 tools for education in ways they’ve seldom been explored before. Keep up with that at the workshop’s bliki (a blog with an embedded wiki!).