CNN.com: Falling asleep in class? Blame biology – study shows that starting school later would decrease the number of students sleeping in class – because they would be getting the needed 8-10 hours of sleep a night.  Hmmm, somehow, I don’t think pushing back the start of the school day would make that much of a difference, but I’m all for it – since I’m soooo not a morning person!

OnGuardOnline.gov – “… a multimedia campaign to help consumers be on guard against Internet fraud, secure their computers, and protect their personal information. …  Includes: tips, articles, games and videos in both English and Spanish. … Contains modules about … spyware, social networking, wireless access, laptop security, Internet auctions, and file-sharing…”  Created in partnership with the Federal trade Commission and other federal agencies.

BubbleComment – record a video comment on a website.  Would be a great way to direct students who were absent are homebound to areas or information on the site that you covered in class.

My friend, Fran Bullington shares “The Wally Principal” over at her Informania blog.  I’ve shared it with a few of my teachers, but think it is too good a point not to share with the rest of you!!  I agree we do our students a disservice by judging them solely by their ability to memorize facts.

My Brochure Maker – quick and simple way to create a basic brochure or flyer brought to you by DoodleLabs.  Could be a great way for your students who don’t have MS Publisher (or MS Word) at home to still create a brochure for your lovely projects!  Granted, you have limited choices and you cannot move the objects around, but sometimes, simple is better!

Suburban Journals: County library labels teen books with sexual content – Okay, this last item I debated on if I should post or not.  So I’ll just put it up and leave you with the comment, “WHAT!!!!” — Well, guess keeping my opinion to myself isn’t likely.  Hey, it’s my blog! — So if you get enough pressure from your patrons, does that mean you’re going to start labeling all of your books for each and every item they don’t like?  Too religious, too violent, crude language, promotes homosexuality, …  IMHO this is just another example of censorship – and isn’t that what libraries are AGAINST? Or am I off track here?

For the first time in MONTHS, my RSS reader is finally empty!  Here are some of the items I found interesting:

CNN.com: “Parents of truant kids can face jail time” – “While students have always suffered the consequences of playing hooky, parents in DeKalb County, Georgia, are facing one of the more aggressive anti-truancy programs in the country, one where punishment can include time behind bars.”  On the one hand, it’s about time parents are held accountable for their kids…on the other, now the schools get to deal with students who don’t want to be there and will most likely cause disruptions in class.

BBC News: “Google Earth Revives Ancient Rome“ – “Google has added a new twist to its popular 3D map tool, Google Earth, offering millions of users the chance to visit a virtual ancient Rome.”  

Kevin Jarrett over at “Welcome to NCS-Tech!” blog shared the following – “TestToob.com – student-generated scientific video community.”  I am linking you to his post so you can see what it’s all about since I I haven’t registered on TestToob.com to explore it myself.

Ken Rodoff over at “The why of it all” blog shared “this is your student on myspace,” a music video from a young woman cautioning kids about what they post on myspace – that it could come back to bite them in the end.

Awesome video shared by Mike Sansone over at the ConverStations blog: “We Are the World – And a Small World it Becomes.“  The post and video refer to Playing for Change: Peace Through Music.

Also, just saw a commercial for TNT’s “The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice,” and while I found the previous two movies to be kinda corny, as a librarian I loved Noah WIle’s line in this new one: “I think its only fair to warn you that I am in fact a librarian!”  Go on over to TNT’s website and watch the preview – you know you want to!  *grin*

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.