NCCE 2010 -- Seattle -- Day 2

The main activity today was a gathering of IT and Administrators. The featured speaker was Hall Davidson. I've seen/heard Mr. Davidson once before and looked forward to this session. I was not disappointed. He remains the dynamic speaker I remember and he shared with us much information that was food for thought.

One aspect of his work more emphasized this time around than before is his connection with Discovery Education. He is one of the Discovery Educators on the Discovery Education Team. Given that Hall has this connection with Discovery Education and the biases that may go along with that connection, a number of the resources he showed us were, indeed, quite impressive. One outgrowth, therefore, of hearing his talk is my intention to delve more deeply into what Discovery Education may be able to offer my students and colleagues.

In no particular order, some of the other tools or ideas he touched on included:

1)iTunes University -- a resource used by a growing number of schools & university to post/offer coursework for students around the globe
2) The 3M Young Scientists Challenge
3) Polleverywhere.com -- giving and taking polls using your cellphone/smartphone to text answers......giving those in the "clicker" business something to have nightmares about!
4) Google Translate -- this service is getting better and better -- it's still free -- and the selection of languages keep growing, too.
5) Google Voice -- another free Google service changing the way we manage our phones and phone numbers
6) UStream.tv -- judging from the response from others in the room, I need to look into this one!
7) Discovery Education -- their home page......also something to delve into in the near future
8) Edmodo -- for teachers interested in a tool like Twitter but want a tool with more educational focus
9) .....and others

One of his pronouncements that he (I think) intentionally wanted to voice and see our reaction was regarding cellphones. He briefly recounted how most schools ban or tightly control their use at school. His advice: Let Them In! Have kids take polls using them. Have kids watch videos using them. Have kids surf the Web using them.

And -- no surprise here -- Hall invited us all to........follow him on Twitter!!! :-)

Following the presentation, we were able to roam around the room and hear mini-presenations about open source resources, check out the Amazon Kindle eReader, creating your own personal learning network, and a table with some netbooks and iTouch to try out (I brought my own iTouch).