IL-TCE
After attending the ICE conference this week, I have realized what an amazing time it is to be an educator. Technology incorporated into the daily curriculum not only provides added knowledge and skills, but makes the whole experience of being a student fun and exciting!
On Tuesday, I was in an all-day workshop on FileMaker Pro. What a great program. It is a database program that not only assists with pulling out invaluable data from our school information system, but helps it make sense and look really good too! It is very powerful and I look forward to putting it to good use.
On Wednesday, I was in an all-day workshop on Weblogs and Wikis! What a wonderful day I had. I created my own blog that you are now on, learned about wikis, RSS feeds and so much more…the best part was I learned about sites and tools on the web that we can all use – FREE!!
On Thursday, I attended some mini-sessions and walked through an exhibition hall which featured many products that a school would be in need of: projectors, very large monitors and screens, software, etc. The mini-sessions I attended were: Technology Coordinators and Teachers, Powerful Palms, and The New Read/Write Web. I also listened to a very interesting keynote speaker – Chris Dede, who is a Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. He was very interesting and his presentation was very powerful. All the sessions I attended were so great and they all had one common denominator – technology must be in the classroom for our kids to succeed in this world. I would like you to read some very strong statements that I accumulated over my 3 days from these professional Technology Educators:
Media shapes participants regardless of age; we are evolving towards distributed learning across space, time, and media; media is an experience in which kids digest rather than information being pre-digested; a desire to learn from experiences with others rather than by yourself; we need to engage students into the curriculum; we are in a society of authorship; Pull vs. Push – learn anything, anywhere, anytime on the web; use the technologies kids come to school with; we need to collaberate around the world instead of just in the classroom…
Here are some statistics:
- There are 70,000 new blogs posted everyday
- One million new postings daily
- Seven million new web pages daily
- 12 million kids creating content on-line
- 3600% increase in consumer generated video in one year
- Wikipedia.com just produced its 1,000,000th article
- Traffic is higher at Wikipedia than at the NY Times
- By the year 2015, there will be 2,000,000,000 internet users
Pretty powerful…what do we need to do to keep our kids on target with technology?
