Not to make anyone jealous, but I’ve actually not been to work all week.  *grin*  I’ve been enjoying the nice (well it WAS nice) weather over here in Myrtle Beach, SC.  Each year I take the week off of school to come vacation for a few days and then attend the EdTech Conference.

Mom and I arrived in Myrtle Beach on Saturday, and I couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful day to drive/arrive.  Yes, you read right, my Mom comes with me each year – hey, she lets me use her time share exchange so I don’t have to pay for a hotel!  The least I can do is let her tag along and be her chauffeur for her shopping excursions.  Such a hardship on my part isn’t it?  Sunday was an equally beautiful day; however, Monday through Wednesday it rained.

This year, to save my school/self money, I became a full-time volunteer for EdTech in order to receive free registration – all I have to do is attend assigned sessions and scan peoples badges for those wanting to receive recertification credit.  How cool is that?!  The beauty is that I was assigned almost (if not all) of my first choices in sessions.  Gotta love those EdTech folks!  I also helped stuff conference bags Tuesday night.  Let me tell you, those EdTech folks are a hoot!  I never thought I’d have fun stuffing bags.

Anyway, as a way to 1) prove to folks (sic principal) I did attend sessions, 2) have a record of my notes for referral, and 3) share what I’ve learned with you guys, I’ll once again post my notes and thoughts about my conference experiences.  So here goes:

Wednesay

Your 2.0 Sandbox: Come Play and Learn – presented by my good friend Cathy Nelson.  I hadn’t planned on attending any sessions on Wednesday, but since it was for Cathy, I of course volunteered to facilitate!  As always, I had fun.  I also enjoyed going to lunch with MaryAnn Sansonetti, Julia Davis, Jessica (sorry, can’t remember your last name!), Cathy, and Chris Craft.  MaryAnn sure loves hush puppies!

SC Online Resources – presented by Catherine Giddens from SC Department of Education – focus was on online professional development opportunities for South Carolina teachers.  They also mentioned Thinkfinity.org (formerly MarcoPolo) and DISCUS.

I was invited to attend a DEN dinner by three different people (thanks guys!) and got to hear more about OnePlaceSC and the great services Discovery Education provides.  My whole lunch group was there along with some other folks I know (in person or by reputation) and I’m seriously considering applying to be a DEN STAR Educator.

Thursday

Today I had a full schedule of sessions to work/attend.  The day started with a bang, started to peeter our, but then finished on a high note for me.

Encouraging Reading Through Technology: Ideas on How to Promote YA Books - Presented by CayLen Whitesides and Robin Mitchell from York Comprehensive High School

Awesome session!  Well worth getting up early to attend.  Here are my notes:

• Use Photostory Booktalks (written/performed by students) as part of their independent novel projects.
• Put message on the marque outside the school (at the road) “Read More Books” so passerby’s are reminded to read, too!  In our case, we’d put this on our internal message board.
• Senior Athletes Read: The media specialists create READ posters of the high seniors to post around the schools.  The seniors choose the book they want to be photographed with and the location of the photo shoot.  The media specialists also created “trading cards” of the seniors with the READ photo/poster, team name, student name, and jersey number on the front.  The back contains their stats: graduation year, position, height, weight, AND FAVORITE CHILDREN’S BOOK.
• In conjunction with the Senior Athletes Read, the school’s COACHES organize the student athletes to go to the elementary school to read to the youngsters.  They hand out their trading cards to the kids (’cause to the elem kids, the high school students are their heroes just as college and pro athletes are our kids heroes)  Of course, their school has a block (or in our school, a class period) assigned as athletic practice.
• Author cards – similar to their senior trading cards, but the front is the picture of a book and the back contains the authors webpage, a couple of other titles, and just a bit about the author.
• Book flyers – picture of the book, summary, and other titles.
• Book PowerPoints – cover of book, book summary, StreamlineSC (United Streaming to non-South Carolinian’s) video clips for relevant info (example, for The Nature of Jade by Deb Caletti they included a clip about elephants and another about teen panic attacks.)
• But the best of the best (for me – and a “duh” moment) was the idea of using a digital picture frame as a literacy promoter.  They save their PPT slides as jpegs and load them to the digital picture frame to highlight whatever they are promoting – be it a single title, an author spotlight, a genre’ spotlight, etc.  She also stated they wrote a grant to pay for purchasing them!  How cool!  [An audience member stated that they now make digital photo frames that play MP3 and/or .avi files.]

Cool Free Tech Tools for Teacher Use – Presented by Michael Edwards from Pelion High School

Presenting freeware products that could be useful in classrooms.  The majority of the items are “games” that he created himself using Mediator software.  I would link to them, but don’t have his permission.  If I obtain permission, I’ll update this post.  The tools he shared include: Cool Timer, TI Flash Debugger, Random Student Picker, Jeopardy 3/4, Adventures in Learning, Koosh Ball Kraze 1 & 2, Trivial Pursuit, President Squares, Think Link, Wheel of Knowledge, Beat The Clock, Seen it: Physical Science Edition.

Apple – Engaging Learners with Innovative Technologies – presented by Janice Adams – showed us some tips and applications in Mac OS X – Leopard.  Included: dictionary app, widget feature in Safari, calculators (standard, scientific, programmers) and Grapher (graphing calculator app).  There were more, but I can’t recall them right now.

The next session I went to was horrible and I won’t embarrass the presenter by documenting it here.  The name for the session was a TOTAL misdirection and if I hadn’t been assigned to scan recert cards, I would have walked out.

Is There a “Second Life” for teachers and students? – presented by Gary Senn.  I’m a total beginner with the whole Second Life phenom.  I had already created an avatar (Sayrah Glazner), and finally was able to get off of the Intro Island prior to the session.  This session was good for me in learning more about how to move around/interact and for places to visit in SL for educators.  I was too busy trying to manuver w/in the program to take notes.  I still don’t know/believe there is a place for SL in my school (or any school), but I had fun learning more about SL.

Overall, today was a good learning day.  I hope tomorrow will be, too!  Somehow, the EdTech folks forgot to assign me to an 8am session, so I’m thinking of sleeping in another hour before heading out to the convention center. Think anyone will miss me?  Of course, the sessions all look like vendor pitches, so I don’t think I’ll miss out on anything…no money or clout to purchase their stuff!

***Note to me for things to bring next year:  a power strip!  I was surprised to see how many people brought laptops.  I’d say the number trippled or quadruppled over last year.  In most sessions there are only one or two power plugs and you have to get there early if you want to plug up or recharge your batteries.

The library has been hopping lately, what with English III research papers and what seems like every teacher needing to schedule research or computer time. This is by no means a complaint; the more use of the library the better! I’d much rather stay busy than be twiddling my thumbs. But if I seem a bit distracted lately, I’d like to share with you two tech projects that have taken over my mind, heart, and time:

The first is the Mayan documentary collaboration project with our Spanish teacher, Ms. Andrews. This isn’t exactly a new project as we tried it out last year with mediocre success. We’ve tweaked it this year and things seem to be going much better. We adjusted the grading rubric and gave students specific deadlines for turning in sections. Students have the option to work alone or in groups. They have to have a minimum of three topics per documentary (if more than 3 members to a group, each member has to contribute at least one topic). Topics cover such areas as religion, daily life, agriculture, architecture, sports, astronomy, writing, etc. Their first task is to research their assigned topic. I created a StreamlineSC assignment builder with images and video clips that the students could use in their project. I created a Mayan pathfinder listing books in the library as well as useful websites. Ms. Andrews also brought in additional books from the public library for students to choose images that I then scanned into the computer.

After they have gathered all of their “stuff” and have documented it on a citation page, they have to then plan out their section using a storyboard. This was a difficult concept for them to grasp and took much explaining on our parts. They kept comparing this to PowerPoint and didn’t understand that we aren’t allowing text except for titles and credits! Many of the students freaked out when we told them that they would be narrating their movies! The storyboard forced them to look at what they were gathering, determine relevance, and plan what they felt was important to say about their topic. At this point, I showed them the basics of using Windows Movie Maker and how to add narration to their sections. They have a few weeks to complete their sections and then I will instruct them on how to finalize their individual sections and combine them into one final documentary/movie.

While we know there will be some students who choose not to participate or will turn in shoddy work; that there are some who will do the bare minimum and are only grudgingly participating; it’s the ones who are excited about doing something different that I find a joy to watch. The ones who are finding WMM cool and who have a “we can do that!” fascination and attitude that make this project one I hope we continue to offer from year to year. If you are interested in the project outline and grading rubric, leave a message in the comments section and I’ll email them to you.

For my second favorite new project, you may not be aware that I’m a member of the South Carolina Young Adult Book Award program. The committee reads 75 consideration titles and narrows them down to 20 nominee titles for student to read and vote on their favorite. The committee decided that this year we’d like to produce podcasts for the individual nominee titles using the booktalks from our activity guide and make them available on the South Carolina Association of School Librarians (SCASL) webpage. Well, me being such a jump on board kinda gal and loving anything tech related immediately nominated my drama club kids to record the podcasts. Thankfully, the drama kids have been excited about this project, too. What we didn’t realize was how difficult it could be to simply read a booktalk into a microphone without any errors! I’ve only had one student successfully complete a one-take recording. Most have to start and stop over and over again and not always because of their mistakes. Because we have no studio or quiet room, the students keep getting interrupted by the intercom, the class change bell, students coming in and out of the library, etc. Originally I gave them this past Friday as the deadline, but with so many more left to record I’m going to have to see about recruiting additional students to help with the recording process. Otherwise, I’m going to have to record the rest of them myself, and while I don’t mind doing that (kinda fun actually) the whole point was to have teens recording them. Maybe a miracle will happen and we’ll get the rest of them recorded Monday! BTW, the podcasts will not be publicly posted until after the Young Adult Book Award booktalk session March 14th at the SCASL annual conference. Sorry.

Speaking of books, here is a site that I came across while searching for audiobooks: LibriVox provides free audiobooks of titles in the public domain. I only listened to a little of part 1 for Peter Pan (one of my all time favorite stories) and it is a pretty good recording so far.