Building Collaborative Classrooms

On January 8, 2009, I attended the Central PA CFF Collaboration Day at York County School of Technology.  I was privileged to be asked to give a short presentation at the beginning of the program–sort of a mini-keynote.  I talked about the impact of CFF on my classroom.  This is a link to my PowerPoint that I used for that presentation.    The rest of the morning was spent in three  breakout sessions with a fire evacuation in the middle.  The sessions that I attended were on blogging, Quia, and Google Earth.

After lunch I participated in a “birds of a feather” session where I answered questions about the use of Google Docs in the Language Arts.

On Tuesday, April 29th and 30th, I attended the 2008 One-to-One Computing Conference at the Penn Stater Conference Center in State College, Pennsylvania. This was a hectic conference with 3 keynote speakers and 5 1-hour sessions in a day that began at 7:30 a.m. and ended at 8:00 pm.

Monday Evening

Monday evening we were introduced to a learning environment called studywizspark, created by the eTech Group Henry Patel and WesBaugh presented the program. The plan for the conference was that all of the presenters’ presentations and blogging and chatting would occur through this learning environment. This is not, however, what happened.

Please feel free to log in to the environment and take a look around using my log in:

http://conference.studywizspark.com

User id: mary.hall

Password: spark100

I, along with many others, continued to communicate and post through their usual methods: blogs, wikis, listserves, email, and webpages. Presenters did not post their materials to studywizspark. It would be very difficult for me to evaluate the post since only presenters were given “teacher” privileges while mere attendees have only “student” privileges.

Tuesday

Opening Keynote: Bernajean Porter, author of Evaluating Digital Products: Training and Resource Tools for Using Student Scoring Guides and DigiTales: The Art of Telling Digital Stories.

Affinity, Joy, Passion

What is the concentual reality I buy into?

Critical Conversations: Innovation and Accountability: complimentary or Contradictory? Conversation Thought Leader: Bernajean Porter, Morderated by Anytime, Anywhere Learning Foundation President, Bruce Dixon.

“Is the drive for accountability an icon of conservatism or an agent of innovation? In this session we will look at how schools can make some of the innovative changes discussed in this morning’s keynote while dealing with the need for and issues around accountability. We will look for the benefits and limits, both real and perceived, that our ideas around accountability present.”

Sustaining and Extending CFF with Open source Software and Open Content: Dr. Scott Garrigan, CAPE Center for Advancing Partnerships in Education

Lunch Keynote “Enabling the New Classroom Conversation”: Paul Curtis, Chief Academic and Innovation

Officer for the New Technology Foundation

Google Docs: Using on-line authoring tools; Deb Kerr & Jane Sutterlin, Instructional Technology Specialists, State College Area School District

What Does a 1-to-1 Classroom Look Like? Brent d. Frey, Education Development Manage, Apple, Inc.

Managing the Digital Classroom; Laurie Vitale, West Shore School District

Dinner Keynote: Bruce Dixon, President, Anytime, Anywhere Learning Foundation

Wednesday

Digital Literacies for the English Classroom; Jamie Meyers, Penn State and a panel of teachers from State College Area School District

Incorporating Technology in the Language Arts Classroom; Alison Kocis, Kutztown Area School District

Digital Storytelling using MS PowerPoint: Sam Bundy, DuBois Area High School

Lunch Keynote: Wade Pogany

Closing Remarks: Kyle Peck, Penn State

Books to get for our professional library:

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink

Tough Choices or Tough Times: The Report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce by National Center on Education and the Economy

Confronting the challenges of Participatory

Although I was not able to attend the presentation, Dan Vos, Holland Christian Schools, Holland, Michigan posted a voice thread that I thought was an interesting use of the tool.

http://www.slideshare.net/secret/sQvZqCXEsmHOtF

http://voicethread.com/#q.b118321.i609698