Illinois Education Technology Conference

During the week of November 16th I had a chance to attend the Illinois Educators Technology Conference in Springfield. This two day conference had sessions on all things technology. Many sessions were presented by classroom teachers or retired teachers sharing best practices. Below are some of the websites that stood out.
Also included are the notes that I took from the 9 sessions I attended. Have a look. If you have any questions about my chicken scratch notes, be sure to let me know.

IETC Ning

A “ning” is a social network. Basically, a place for members to collaborate together (similar to our District Wide and School Wide Areas within First Class). If you clicked on “Thursday Sessions” or “Friday Sessions” you would be taken to descriptions of the sessions. Many sessions have links to handouts or presentations. If you come across any topics or ideas that peak your interest and want to get more information on them let me know.




TagCrowd

TagCrowd is the same concept as Wordle. It is a visual way to represent any text. The difference between this application and Wordle begins with TagCrowd giving you html code to embed your word cloud into a blog/wiki/webpage, etc. It also allows you to select a website, upload a word text document, or put in your own text. You can also set a maximum amount of words to show. A cool application of word clouds that I heard about involved using Wordle to compare one of President Obama’s speeches with the New York Times’ news article about the speech. Putting both into Wordle allowed the students to quickly see which words Obama brought up multiple times and the same with the Times. It showed the students how the newspaper focused on specifics in the speech that Obama may have only mentioned once or twice…
Following is a TagCrowd word cloud that I generated using the opening paragraph to this week's blog:

16th attend best chance chicken classroom conference educators illinois included notes practices presented questions retired scratch sessions sharing springfield stood sure teachers technology things took websites week

created at TagCrowd.com

Creative Powerpoint Projects

Roberta Thomas had a great poster session, where she brought examples of creative powerpoint projects she’s completed with her 4th grade classroom. Click on the above link to see her slide show. The link here will take you to some of the powerpoint project templates.


42Explore

4 to Explore is a directory of websites to visit based on specific topics. There are more than 4 resources for just about all topics listed, but the name was catchy…..browse through the list and see if you find something relevant.




Blog and Wiki Experience: how does life impact learning?

I feel like I’ve beat the “blog/wiki” horse to death, but Danielle Brush Lewis has a great pdf on her site about ideas for blogs and wikis. Maybe this time one will stand out to you……

Truger TechTalk

Ann Truger keeps a wiki with tons of links to various web resources, such as “fun with digital images”, and “Fun with Google”. Some of her other areas aren’t active yet, however.



Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine like Google. It is a “computational knowledge engine”. You can put in any mathematical question and it will not only give you the results but will in some instances give you steps as well. Put in a date or a name and see tons of information on it. Anyone who talked about this site raved about it! Check it out…



Finally…here’s a short video made by a second grader at the conference!


Find more videos like this on Illinois Education and Technology Conference


My notes.....