Wednesday, July 19, 2006
No keynote address today. After breakfast it was off to a workshop..
Session 1
Direct from NECC: Debut of Inspiration’s Brand New Software – InspireData!
Presenter: Jennifer Wagner
This session was actually added at the last minute. Jennifer had attended NECC which was about a week after InspireData was released by Inspiration. She saw it at NECC and found it to have much potential and was excited about this approach to having kids work with databases.
As before, I think it will be better to link her presentation here and retype it all. There is, of course, information available directly from Inspiration, too, that shows what InspireData can do:
http://www.inspiration.com/productinfo/inspiredata/index.cfm?fuseaction=features
I came away from the workshop pretty enthused about what we might be able to do with InspireData. The only drawback was clear in the demo today: it’s still so new that much remains to learn about it and, as a brand new product, there are glitches, some of which we saw today (some freezing of the program, for example). InspireData is definitely worth a second and third look.
Since this is the last day of the conference, and the final group session takes place in just a bit, I finally sat down and took the time I needed to go online and complete the evaluations for the sessions I had attended and for the conference itself.
Everyone gathered back in the Elder Performing Arts Hall for the much-anticipated final get-together which included – yippee!—door prizes. The potential booty ranged from laptop cases to software licenses to a tablet PC (!). It was a nice concluding event – and, no, I didn’t win any of the door prizes. However, in these three days, I was definitely a winner in the sense that I was exposed to a range of new thinking and ideas that will give me plenty to chew on for some time to come.
As I look back to my days at the 2006 Lausanne Laptop Institute, I am extremely grateful for having had the opportunity to attend this event. As was the case last year, as much as I’ve enjoyed the other conventions I’ve attended both in Seattle and other parts of the country, my Laptop Institute experiences outpace them all as interesting, effective, and engrossing experiences (I must say that this year’s first PNAIS Tech “Share” Conference was also very, very good). I can’t believe it’s all flown by so fast! Everyone here has been incredibly friendly, approachable, energized, creative, and dedicated to their work with students. The weather was a drag with the triple digit daytime highs but, then, pretty much everything here is air-conditioned so it didn’t really put a kibosh on anything except long walks in the afternoon.
If I were to assign “tags” to this year’s Laptop Institute, the ones that come to mind first include tablets, blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, moodle, collaboration, “the world is flat,” and constructivist teaching and learning. Allowing for hype, there does seem traction to the notion that we’re coming to a realization of the power of sharing information and collaboration through online tools and resources. It’s a very exciting time to be in schools and, at the same time, in educational technology, where change and creativity seem everywhere. Remembering that you can do only so much “online,” I can’t forget to repeat that it was wonderful to think, listen, and learn in the midst of such a great group of people with such dedication and passion about their work in schools. Blogging or IM-ing or posting to a forum are all great ways to communicate these days but nothing yet can substitute for meeting with and talking to people face-to-face. Great conference!
