As the technology coordinator at my school, it’s often up to me to provide professional development for our teachers in this area. Lots of times they work out, sometimes they turn out to be a total waste of time for one reason or another. For this reason, I always try to analyze the sessions I attend at ISTE as to what made them successful or not and use those lessons when I plan my own sessions.

Fortunately this year it was a high percentage of valuable sessions at this year’s conference. I attended several by people who are required to present formal presentations as a regular part of their job – college professors, professional trainers, principals – and all of their sessions were good. Interestingly it was the classroom teachers who lead sessions that weren’t very good.

Like the session on Google Earth. I was really looking forward to this session because, although I think Google Earth is a great program, I’ve never figured out a way to use it with students. About a year ago, I did set up a lesson in which students needed to find something in the program, but when the students launched it, they all didn’t see the same thing – there were several different variations in what was being shown. There was such a difference that I couldn’t give a direction because it was different for so many of the students. I soon gave up and went to something else.

So I really wanted to find out more about this program and ideas on how to use it with students. Unfortunately I didn’t get that with this session. The presenter was certainly knowledgeable and gave out a lot of information about different tools and resources available within the program but I didn’t really get a picture on how to present that to students or why I would want to. (Much of it seemed geared to secondary students, so that was part of the problem.)

During the session, we were encouraged to “play with” and explore Google Earth, but I’ve already done that on my own time. For me, what would have been more helpful is if I were given some task to do and see what connections I could make on my own – then I’d have a better idea on how to utilize the power of the program for my students.

I did get the idea of trying it out next year before the fourth grade students go to Carlsbad. They could follow the route we’re going to travel, locate Guadalupe Peak along the way so they’ll know which mountain that is and see if there’s any virtual tours available.

I also attended a session on creating a student-produced news program. We’re going to start a media class at our school so this session was especially relevant to me. It wasn’t a total waste by any means – it was interesting to see the different roles they gave students and the different segments they had (one of which – a public service announcement – was a good one that I hadn’t thought of). But they took too long on this and then the hands-on portion was a waste. They had these templates for us to download and adapt them a little bit. Again, it was interesting to see, but it would have been a lot more helpful if we’d learned how to make our own templates. I’ll use some of their ideas, but it’s not going to be exactly the same and I doubt any other school would have their’s exactly the same as our’s. So I think that would have been a lot more helpful.

Creating an engaging technology session is extremely hard, especially at a conference at ISTE where the attendees are so knowledgeable. I know the presenters were prepared and had useful knowledge to impart, but something got lost in the translation. At least, for myself, I didn’t get the necessary experience from the sessions that would push me forward in these two areas. You win some, you lose some.

Steve Dembo is one funny guy. He kinda resembles John Belushi and has the same blustery-with-a-wink personality. He had the participants laughing throughout this hour long session.

It was called Extreme Makeover: Education Edition and the idea was that he was going to teach tech newbies how to use some Web 2.0 tools. I was there to see which websites he chose and how he would introduce each one.

Most of the websites he went through were ones I was familiar with – he went over Blabberize (why didn’t we do anything with that last year?), ipadio (which I wrote about in May) and how to start a blog.

He spent the most amount of time on Wallwisher, a very simple website which lets you create a virtual corkboard on which you or your students can add their own notes, and has lots of possible uses. I’m definitely going to have to find ways to use that next year.

The funniest one was Let Me Google That For You, for those colleagues who email you questions they could very easily find for themselves if they’d only take a minute to Google it themselves.

Steve’s approach to these websites was very similar to the one Tammy Worcester uses in many of her sessions: He would show the basics of each website, explain how to get started and give ideas on how to use it in the classroom. It was very fast paced and enjoyable for the inexperienced tech teacher as well as the experienced ones.

Last spring when I was planning a session for the TNT technology conference in El Paso, my goal was to pick something that would be popular. I wanted a session so huge that it would pack the room and I’d have to turn people away. So I shamelessly applied two insights I had attending NECC in 2008: (1) conference attendees, like casual book readers, like practical sessions with numbers in them, and (2) teachers like sessions like the one Tammy Worcester gave that have a lot of different ideas and presented in such a way that they can get a picture of how they would use it in the classroom.

The result was 50 Great Math Websites for the Elementary Classroom, and yes it worked. The room was packed and I did have to turn people away. Success!

I attended Tammy’s session on Monday titled Tammy’s Favorite Free Web Tools and she was great again. Her session started on 3:30 after a long day. I was tired, my head was sore, I was in the mood for a long nap. Yet within the first five minutes of the workshop, I got a second wind because I was excited about the things I was learning about. She had so many great websites and many of them even I had never heard of. I don’t know how she does it.

I think part of the reason she’s so successful is that in these types of sessions, she has so many resources to share, you know if there’s one that quite doesn’t catch your fancy, there’s going to be another one coming soon. But there’s a danger in this approach in that it just becomes just a big long list that makes your head spin. Tammy though spends some time on each tool – she shows how to get up and running on each one and then she gives some different ideas on how it can be used. It really is a good template on one way to present a session, one I think some (though not all) presenters would benefit from picking up on.

My favorites of the websites she presented were ones that would allow students to much more easily produce and share creative work than in the past.

• JamStudio – An online music-making site, which can either complement or use in place of GarageBand. (Make sure you scroll down to the bottom and click on the In the Classroom link so you can get free access to the site.)

• Vocaroo – I’ve written about ipadio, which is the easiest way to make a podcast. But if you want to have a student make a one-off recording of something, Vocaroo is the easiest. Perhaps the best part is that it doesn’t require a login! Yet it will still save the recording, it provides an embed code so it can be put into blogs.

• Sketchcast – With this website you can record what you sketch onscreen along with your voice. You could have students describing a math concept or explain how to solve a problem. Unlike Vocaroo, it does require a log-in which unfortunately does a hoop you’d have to jump through.

• Jing – Jing is an alternative to Sketchcast but it’s an application that would have to be installed. (There is both a Windows or Mac version available.) Now when I tried to use Jing in the past, it seemed like I had to upgrade for it to be able to do what I wanted it to do and I already have Screenflow. I need to try it again to see if it would work for students.

I also attended a session on Google Spreadsheets and Forms that Tammy presented. She did a good job, but I didn’t get as much out that one because I’m already familiar with the basics which is what she covered. I did learn there was a way to make a spreadsheet template in Google Docs and there’s an easier way to check if an answer is correct if you make a quiz with Google forms, but she didn’t cover that.

Links are available for the Free Web Tools and the Google Spreadsheets and Forms examples.

Location:Stout St,Denver,United States

The first ISTE session I attended was Getting the Most From Your iPhone: Apps, Tricks and Tricks by David Pownell. It was a fun session; a little of it was education specific, but I think most of it was stuff that the average iPhone or iPod Touch person would be interested in. The beginning of the session lagged a little as the presenter had no way to show what was on his iPhone screen. He tried the best he could and got things going, but he could only go so far by describing what was going on (followed by a lot of what-was-thats and could-you-go-over-that-agains). Fortunately one of the attendees came to the rescue and graciously arranged for a document camera to be delivered, which improved the session immensely.

Like David, I download a lot of apps to try out and I was wondering if I was actually going to learn something new, but I did discover a few gems. To his credit, David encouraged people to jump in and they recommended some great apps as well. Some of my favorites:

* iTreadmill ($0.99)- a simple pedometer
* PopMath ($0.99, free lite version available) – a fun way to help students learn basic computational facts
* Autoverbal ($0.99)- will speak text typed into it, for autistic children

Perhaps my favorite one was Siri (free). It’s similar to Yelp in that it’ll find nearby places, like restaurants, gas stations or movie theaters, but you make requests with your voice. Also it seems to provide better results. When I’m searching for a restaurant in Yelp, it gives me a whole bunch of choices that are close by, but they don’t seem to be in any particular order and a lot of them will not be within walking distance. Siri seemed to give you to closest restaurants, but I’ll have to try that out more.

David posted both the apps and the tips he presented on his website. Check them out!

Location:Quebec St,Denver,United States

I’ve just got back to my hotel after my first full day at ISTE 2010. It went well. Things don’t really get going until tomorrow for me. Today, I tried to find my way around the city and figure out where everything is at the convention center.

Here are some highlights of Day 1:

* The opening keynote was not well received by the attendees. It was given by Jean-François Rischard, a former Vice President of the World Bank. Which is too bad because he has a lot of expertise and knowledge. The basic message was that the world political systems are currently not able to apply solutions to very serious problems (or as columnist Thomas Friedman calls them, “suboptimum solutions”), so we’re going to depend on today’s young people to come up with innovations to save us. I mean, talk about adding relevance to our curriculum!

Unfortunately Mr. Rischard was not a very charismatic speaker. His presentation was full of lists and PowerPoint slides such as this one

which he went over in some detail. He has some good insights and I would’ve liked to have heard more about his past experiences as he tried to solve some of these problems. (Doesn’t the World Bank have some influence in these areas?) As it was, I really didn’t get a lot out of it.

* The Conference Kickoff didn’t break any new ground – it basically just went over all the great things ISTE does – but it was a lot of fun. Mario Armstrong, who covers technology for NPR’s Morning Edition, was an energetic host and the event reinforced my conviction to not let things get in the way next year. We have the infrastructure and the knowledge to make Edgemere a model school when it comes to using technology to help students build their own knowledge. Let’s do it!!

* This year I’m staying in an official conference hotel, which makes things easier because they provide shuttles that take me from the hotel to the conference site and back, saving me the trouble of driving or walking (or using Google Maps for the mass transit information, like I had planned.)

* The hotel I’m staying in is HUGE. It’s 11 stories big, has it’s own parking garage and seems to be bustling with activity all the time. The rooms are nice, but from the inside lobby it looks particularly ugly. Just rows of horizontal floors stacked to the ceiling, sort of like one of those old hotels but this is all inside.

Since every floor overlooks the lobby, it also is not the place with anyone thar has a fear of heights. I’ve developed a mild case of this and it freaks me out a little every time I have to leave my room!

Here’s a picture I took looking down towards the lobby. It’s as close as I could get to the ledge.

I have a feeling Alfred Hitchcock could’ve made good use out of this hotel a movie. Freaky!

* Before I left, I purchased the GPS Drive HD app for my iPad to help me to get to my hotel and anyplace else I would want to drive to. It was my first time using any type of GPS device and it was fun. It was amazing how well it kept track of exactly where I was in the city. The information on the map was clear, the voice directions were loud enough and I had enough information at the right time to figure out what to do. Being in a different city, there was one time where I was in the wrong lane to go to the street I wanted to, but the app quickly figured out a new route and everything worked out.

* Since I’m going to do all my writing for this conference on my iPad, I decided I needed to go to the Apple Store so I could get a wireless keyboard. So I decide the best time to go is Sunday morning, right when the store opens at 11 AM. I end up getting to the store at 11:05 and although the mall itself is fairly empty, the Apple Store is already bustling with activity! I wonder if that’s normal or if it’s because of all the conference people in town like me.

Anyway, I find the keyboard and I can’t figure out how to pay for it. There’s not one cash register in the whole store. Finally, I ask someone how I’m supposed to pay for it. She points me with someone and he starts putting in information on his iPod Nano, even using it to scan in my credit card. Finally he goes off to print my receipt and that was it.

* The wireless keyboard works great by the way!

See you tomorrow!

Location:California St,Denver,United States

Ok, this is old news, but it’s new to me and it’s still very cool. So I was looking around Denver in the Maps app on my iPhone and I wanted to see the route between the hotel I’m staying at and the Colorado Convention Center, where this year’s  ISTE conference is being held later this month. I checked out the route by foot (too far, unfortunately), then by car, and then I decided to click the bus icon. Now this button has never done anything for me in the past, but look what came up this time!!

Train and bus routes, complete with arrival and departure times. How cool is that!

This feature’s been around a few years but it skipped my attention, probably because El Paso unfortunately is not one of the cities where this service is available. Too bad. I think this is incredibly helpful and I look forward to using it in Denver.