Wednesday, March 16, 2005

NCCE 2005 -- Seattle -- Day One

Today is the opening day of the annual Northwest Council of Computer Education (NCCE) being held in Seattle. I've attended a NCCE convention since last time it was held in Seattle (I think the conventions alternate between Seattle, Portland, and Spokane).

The site for NCCE 2005 is here.

The convention is set to last through Saturday and I'm looking forward to learning a great deal.

The first workshop today is called "Surveys and Hotlists and Blogs, Oh My!" As suggested by the title, the presenter has walked us through some free online surveys (Zoomerang, SurveyMonkey, and ProfilerPro), free online hotlist creator (Filementality), and blogs (she chose to focus on Blogger.com). The three-hour session flew by pretty quickly! There are probably tons of other resources to do these things online but I hope to try using at least the survey and hotlist tool soon when I get back to school

Another 3-hour workshop I attended today was "Technology in the Classroom: SmartBoards and Classroom Performance Systems (CPS)." The three presenters were: Jeredene Mayfield (Coordinator of Technology Integration, Golden Triangle Cooperative, Montana), Lisa Legare (Middle/High School teacher, Glasgow Public Schools, Montana), and Michelle Harrell (Coordinator of Technology Integration, North East Technology Consortium). I was there mostly interested in learning more about SmartBoards, particularly since we have one now at the Middle School for trial purposes. Theirs was a very effective demo and I learned a great deal about SmartBoards. Watching one in action was, once again, kind of exciting. I hope our experiment at the Middle School turns out well! In any case, a couple resources they included were Jere's professional development site, a geography/map site (Sheppard Software), and the North Central Montana Technology Consortium (NOCENTC) page....all of which have great resources including some for SmartBoard use, tips and tricks.