Day 2 of the 2007 TCEA conference has been engaging, entertaining, enlightening, and fun! Here are some notes and thoughts that I’ve had throughout the day…
Note: These last posts from the TCEA conference are posted after-the-fact — The network at the conference center was a little slower today than yesterday which made connecting to the internet a little frustrating.
Note #2: Some of this post is also cross-posted on the SIF Notes blog.
Technorati Tags: edtech, education, innovation, instruction, instructional+technology, leadership, learning, PLC, science, TCEA, teaching, technology, Web2.0
I started the day by visitng some vendor booths and learning a little more about a few new tools for the classroom. One that really caught my eye was the Texas Instruments Ti-Navigator — it’s a bit like the CPS systems that our teachers have been using but it has more functionality and looks like a great system to use in formative assessment FOR learning. Teachers can get instant feedback on the students’ understanding and mastery of concepts — allowing for instant instructional decisions (“do I go on or do I stop and reteach?”).
I then ventured upstairs to sit in on a session on GeoCaching in the classroom. It was interesting to see how this is being used in a classroom — even though the classroom was elementary and I work at the high school level.
My next stop was back in the exhibit hall where I sat in on the eInstruction demo of their CPS system — which is what my school has been using. I wanted to compare the new version against the Ti-Navigator that I saw earlier in the morning. Both systems are effective and do allow for instant classroom feedback — but I feel myself being drawn towards the Ti-Navigator system. I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has used both systems to get your impressions. (On second thought — use the Ti-Navigator for math and possibly science classrooms, and purchase the other systems for all other classrooms.)
Texas Instruments also gave out some nifty “We All Use Math Everyday” t-shirts inspired by the television show NUMB3RS, and you can get free classroom activities that tie math into the plot lines of the television show on the TI website. Oh yeah — I also picked up some cool “We All Use Math Everyday” posters for my math teachers!
One product that REALLY wow’d me was InspireData from Inspiration (makers of Inspiration and Kidspiration concept-mapping software). This new software program, which they promote as a way to help students visualize, analyze, and manipulate data, is also a great tool for PLCs! I received a brochure in the mail about InspireData a few months ago and I was interested then — but from an instructional standpoint. When I saw the software in action yesterday during the demo, I was sold on it as a tool for PLC teams or a school-wide data team. Data can be imported from Excel — and then it can be manipulated faster and easier than in Excel — and in a very visual way that many teachers (and administrators) will appreciate. I really think this application could accelerate the speed of our own data analysis, interpretation, triagulation of multiple data sets, and manipulation of information. You can learn more, and download a free 30-day trial, here. I’ve already purchased a copy of this for myself.
Podcasting, podcasting, and more podcasting…
This topic was spread across many of the sessions (including two of the sessions that I sat on in the afternoon), the exhibit hall, and interspersed through all of the conversations that I had with friends and colleagues. In the conversations that I had, the discussion revolved around what (what is it? how do you do it?), so what (why do we need to do this? should we do this?), and now what (okay, you’ve convinced me and now I BELIEVE, so how do we get started? what hardware and software do we need?)
There was also more conversation about the use of free open-source software in education. Why pay for overly expensive software programs like Word and Excel when Google Docs provides basically the same stuff for free (and it’s web-based!)? If we eliminate — or at least reduce — the cost of software and licenses, we free up more funds for more hardware — handhelds (Palm Pilots, Pocket PCs, calculators, GPS), iPods (for podcasting), SmartBoards, and laptops for 1-to-1 solutions.
As the day ended, I was unable to make it to the Edublogger Meetup — but it looks like a few people did meetup and had an interesting conversation. I was at a district meeting/social learning a little more about some of the plans for my own district. Too bad I couldn’t be in two places at once!
Change Agency by Stephanie Sandifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You may copy, distribute, transmit and/or remix this content for noncommercial uses as long as you attribute the work to Stephanie Sandifer (with link back to the original post) and agree to license the work under the same or similar license.
