2008 MACUL Conference Blog

Whenever I come back from the annual MACUL conference, I’m always delighted to see the excitement on the faces of my colleagues that attended and read inspiring comments online. Almost everyone that attends finds some engaging new way to use technology in their classrooms or buildings. The new-found discoveries and energy can be contagious, and other educators in my building pouted about not attending after seeing how enthusiastic we were coming off the conference.

Find more videos like this on MACUL Space

Thanks to ETCC, MACUL’s Educational Technology Coordinator Conference, you can help share the excitement of the larger conference with ed tech leaders in your building. It’s next week, April 22nd at the Macomb ISD It’s not to late to register online!

It’s officially one week since MACUL 2008 closed it’s doors, but the conversations are still going strong, thanks in part to the terrific work from the MACUL Conference Bloggers! This year alone we amassed over 80 posts about the conference, dozens of comments, and have sparked several conversations (both online and face to face) about extending and enhancing the conference experience. Too often, I receive thanks for putting it all together, but I’m always quick to protest that it’s not me who deserves the accolades, but rather the teachers, tech-integrators, and all around incredible people that blogged at this year’s conference.

If you were a conference attendee and gave a little bit of your time to blog about the conference and included the tag “macul08“, my deepest thanks to you for helping provide a connected learning experience for us all. And of course, those educators that put in their time and effort several months in advance to blog here on the MACUL Conference Blog, please accept my most sincere appreciation and gratitude for going above and beyond your normal duties to provide both conference attendees and those following along from home such excellent coverage of the MACUL 2008 Conference in Grand Rapids! All of the bloggers did a fantastic job of paving the way for great discussions coming out of this year’s conference.

Just in case you wanted a recap of your favorite blogger’s posts, or if you want to thank them personally with a comment, just click on one of the blogger’s names and you can see all of the hard work they put into the MACUL Conference Blog.

Kevin Clark

Steve Dickie

Janine Lim

Andy Losik

Joe Rommel

Pam Shoemaker

Jim Wenzloff

Melissa White

Image: ‘THANK YOU‘
www.flickr.com/photos/45581782@N00/2086641

I went to the 11:30 Friday Session of Bret Mason. The presentation was designed to raise awareness of online threats and provide content to share with students to increase awareness and safety. Brett and his co-presenter began the presentation sharing stories of students who were “unfinished photo albums” having taken their own lives as a result of bullying behavior. I think this would be an effective way to begin a discussion with students. The presentation also included several videos designed to promote safety and raise awareness, I will definitely be sharing some of these with my sixth graders before the year is out.

Here is the link for Brett’s cyberbullying webpage (which includes the video links).

Congrats to all of my fellow bloggers for doing a great job covering this year’s conference. Special thanks goes to Ben Rimes for his leadership during this project.

It has been really nice to go back and read about sessions I couldn’t attend. I spent a huge chunk of yesterday afternoon using the stuff Hall Davidson presented on Google Earth even though I was presenting at the same time. I went to Ben Rimes’ GE session and took what I learned there and combined it with Hall’s links. Want to catch fish on Hutchins Lake in Fennville? Find the KMZ file here.

A handful of us covered the conference as “official” bloggers but we have 100s of potential bloggers. The beauty of a blog is that it is a two-way street. Now is your chance to share your favorite sessions and cool ideas you took away from the conference.

Whose session we haven’t discussed deserves some recognition? Let your voice be heard.

Whew!  What a day and what a conference.  The last session is about to begin… Hall Davidson is presenting on Thinking Big as the World Gets Small.  As i’m sitting here everyone is looking around for the boxes…you know, the ones you put your nametag in to win fun and fabulous prizes.  I’m pretty sure I’m going to win something good this time…

Hooray for Berrien Springs Middle School teachers (and the RBS) being mentioned by Hall in his words of thanks…

There is geographic shrinking…the world is closer than it once was.  There is also a temporal shrinking…

Hall has had the pleasure of connecting with lots of educators…sharing connections and experiences.

We have all these tools…but as educators we are unstoppable and we find a way.

Kids are already in virtual communities…Club Penguin, for example.  The distance between imagination and reality is shrinking.

How do we teach innovation?  Start with what they have in their pockets…iPods and cell phones.  iPods are being used to assist bilingual students learn English…there are a lot of other examples as well. Harvard, Stanford, and MIT all have course curriculum downloadable from iTunes.

(I only have 20 minutes of battery left…oh boy…)

What if Anne Frank had had a blog?  Students have stories to tell!..and you can empower your kids to do it!

That’s all the juice I have…too bad I couldn’t say more, but I suspect there will be other posts on this session.  I had a great time here in Grand Rapids and am looking forward to actually reading some of the posts here!

Gary Stager again for Digital Democracy. This blog is more of a stream of notes jotted during the session. 

Richard Dreyfuss is a proponent of civics education, and argues that our democracy is at risk unless we educate our students to participate in democracy.

Gary says his social activism is inspired by his 7th grade social studies teacher, who, every day, the students knew they might have to march on the school board so he could keep his job.

What’s possible?

• making sense of data (with tools like Google Earth, GIS Software, InspireData, TinkerPlots, Fathom, Mathematica). Use the vast amounts of data to make an inquiry of the data & look for the answers.
• mathematics of polling
• historical perspective
• propaganda creation
• effective communication

Social science applications of math that are really critical for our society.

Mathematica has access to huge databases of information.

50% of mathematics has been invented since World War II. It’s partly the social sciences demand for numbers.

Is Democracy Fair? The Mathematics of Voting and Apportionment

We need kids to be thoughtful and to be able to get answers from multiple sources. You don’t really know something until you look at it from multiple sources. The web makes it easier to look at topics from multiple sources.

We should be really careful at pointing a finger at wikipedia and the web when we’ve been allowing textbook publishers to lie by omission for so many years. The example was the whole speech of Dr. Martin Luther King. Most of us didn’t recognized it until several pages into it.

Primary sources ….
There are always controversial topics for discussion in a democracy.

Why aren’t kids taking the same raw footage and this side of the room make an ad for that person and this side of the room made an ad against that person. (or a consumer product). Every candidate has video online you can digitize and download and manipulate in this way.

One way to make informed decisions is to know how you’re being manipulated. The way to understand how your’e being manipulated is to create your own manipulations yourself.

What ways to use you to make someone look bad: slow mo, tight shows, black and white, testimony, music cut off to pay more attention, playing on emotions and ears, parody, the nostalgic autobiography,

For an example of the parodies, look at Swift Kids for Truth

Ask kids - what makes you feel positive or negative about someone? ask kids to make for & against commercials.

Political activism / citizen journalism
Kids press freedoms have eroded so far; why does it matter? how come it doesn’t occur to them to publish their own stuff?

It’s cheap and easy to worry about people far away (classroom projects for Darfur etc.), but do we care about being active in the local community?

Battleground Minnesota - Shakademic - an example of student journalism. Look at these: Media Rights News, Shakademic’s MySpace site, Get Battleground.

High school kids who have never talked to an adult - had an actual conversation - not just being talked at or bossed around.

If you send an email and ask “can you do this at your earliest convenience, people answer.” Kids can invite people someone to talk to the students - they need to learn that they can do this and how to do it.

They need to learn to interact with adults on a civil basis.

Kids could be looking at real problems in our community and trying to solve them.

“School is like an empowerment free zone for too many kids” why do kids just shrug and take it? we have to teach them they aren’t powerless, helpless and defenseless.

Another example of student work: Joey interviews a cutter:
Youth Radio Project also read more on wikipedia.

Very thought-provoking session as usual. Challenging to do these types of activities with kids, but essential to teach kids civics. 

Yes, I’m blogging the Guerrilla sessions again, this is the last time, I promise. (at least for this year). I just left the XO-Laptop meetup. The XO’s were kind of cool, but they weren’t behaving right. They seemed to be having trouble networking with each other. Sherry seemed to think the MACUL network was inhibiting them in some way.

But, far cooler than the XO’s, sorry Sherry, we’re the two Pleo’s Karl brought with him. These little robotic dinosaurs will interact with each other or with people. Here’s a little video clip I shot of them with the iSight camera on my MacBook.

Michael McVey is a new professor Eastern Michigan University who began teaching a class, Web 2.0 Tools in Education, or something similar.  He basically threw a huge number of Web 2.0 tools at his students to see which would stick and which would be thrown away.  Everything was done in an online environment and he discovered that some work, and of course, some don’t.

Michael’s take on Web 2.0:

Recipients become Communicators…

How did they begin?  Started by using Flickr…everyone understands photo sharing.  What else did they use?

• Second Life
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google Docs
• PBwiki
• Ning
• Del.icio.us

One of the first assignments was to create a social network on Ning.  As they set up their social network, they were also researching sites and tagging them in del.icio.us.  This then created a common pool of information to reference.

They used Doodle to schedule meeting times.  They also dessiminated information by podcasting with Gcast…also used podOmatic.

Every student was required to set up a blog on Blogger, which Michael subscribed to via Bloglines.  Bloglines is a aggregator that collects and keeps track of new entries to the blogs (and other sites) you subscribe to.  Because students were connected to each other and the writing/sharing that was going on, their own writing was positively affected.

Students also stayed connected via Twitter.  Wrote collaboratively with Google Docs and PBwiki.

Michael really enjoyed watching how deep and thoughtful student writing and ideas became.

What were some of the conclusions? (Oh…he’s going too fast.)  Obviously, some good and some not as good.  Probably won’t use Twitter again…it didn’t really help with collaboration.

Good job, Michael.  You have a lot of first hand experience that benefitted the rest of us.  The last session on Friday is probably the worst time to have your presentation, but there were lots of folks and everyone stayed until the end.

In Sue’s sessions, we connected to four new content providers.

The Oilers Ice School We talked to the main character in the book A Loonie for Luck. Students learn about simple machines in making a vehicle related to zamboni machines. Students learn about the world of work and different careers too. They are just getting started.

Next we connected to author Janie Panagopoulos. She can come directly to your school and talk to your students about writing. She connects from her home office. She can tailor the programs to your learning needs - podcasts, writing feedback, asking and answering questions, walking students through the writing process, etc. Janie is really enthusiastic and interactive with the students and “jumps out the screen” to interact and motivate your students.

Then we headed over to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The presenter dug out some Lions paraphernalia for our viewing pleasure. They are new to videoconferencing and taking their existing educational activities and adapting them to videoconferencing. All of their programs include pre and post visit activities. One interesting program is the Careers in the NFL to learn about other careers in the NFL besides just professional athletics. They have 5 new programs in preparation for next school year: Brian’s Song, African American Pioneers, Team Nicknames, and NFL Media / economics. By the way, they have a grant that subsidizes actual transportation. They are really cheap programs - $50 a program!! That’s a seriously good deal.

Finally we headed over to the Calvert Marine Museum. They are starting their programs in the fall of 2008. They have wonderful pictures and graphics to show in their presentations. Their educational content includes sharks, estuary, maritime heritage, climate change, etc. For being a newbie content provider, they have a great handle on the use of the camera, visuals, backgrounds, and bringing in other resources. I look forward to connecting to this provider when they get up and running.

My favorite thing about the TWICE sessions, is when the teachers say, “how do I do this?” and after asking them where they are, we can tell them how they already have access to videoconferencing. And then they say, “You’re kidding. Really?!” It’s so unfortunate tho’ that they don’t realize the power of the technology they already have!

Google Earth is for a lot more than just finding your house or a place to get a tall, skinny, double, caramel macchiato on your way to Whole Foods.

Ben Rimes from Mattawan, MI demonstrated several of the many great learning tools located in the layers of the the standard edition of Google Earth.

Ben went on to show attendees all kinds of additional free online resources like Google Earth Blog and the perfect-for-integration Google Lit Trips.  He finished by demonstrating projects produced entirely in Google Earth by his 5th Graders.

Check out Ben’s resources at his blog: Tech Savvy Educator.