Learning, Teaching & Technology

The podcasts and vodcasts are up and the sessions for the K-12 Online Conference are available. I’ve been authorized to take the course for credit and have started listening and participating along with Mike and Alice. Some of the participants in the Yarmouth Teaching and Learning with Technology summer course are doing sessions that are connected to their goals. This is a revolution in online learning anywhere, anytime.

Nancy March and I presented this wiki: The Digital Classroom. We only had a few elementary teachers attend the session, but we had a good conversation about what can be done in an integrated classroom using cameras and computers.

The third week in October is the annual Maine Technology Conference sponsored by ACTEM. This year was the second year of Thursday workshops prior to the Friday sessions. Will Richardson reviewed some of the tools that he is exploring and using from the Web 2.0 realm. He is using the Google suite of documents, blogs, reader and can access them on his iPhone. It was great to have a chance to listen to him and try things along with him in a room of only 30 people. Overall the conference organizers did a phenomenal job of organizing and arranging for speakers, presenters and attendees. Alice Barr was a runner up for the Technology Educator of the Year Award and it was my pleasure to have assisted in her nomination. I look forward to some of the presentations coming online. It was a great pleasure to take Nancy March and Richard Sellinger with me as classroom teachers attending sessions and getting ideas they will put in to place back at school

Thanks to the folks at bugscope online I just realized a longheld dream of connecting to the scanning electron microscope and scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Campus for a live session with a class of 3rd graders. The scientists ran a live “chat” with the class and responded to questions from each of the students. We had mailed them some insects and critters we had collected from the schoolyard and then I controlled the microscope as we all viewed them with magnifications to 3 nanometers (1 nanometer=1 billionth of a meter). The students questions were thoughtful and the responses from the scientists made us all feel like we studying together.

I first heard about “bugscope” in a GLEF video published in 2000 showing students at Clear View Charter School in California. More recently, I read that the live conferencing shown in that video wasn’t available, but an online chat with photos was free to schools who wanted to participate.  What a wonderful opportunity for students to connect their outdoor classroom, hands-on science to University level questioning and exploration. For more information about the history and current availability of the project go to this edutopia link. If you want to login as a guest to one of our future live class sessions email me at cathy.wolinsky@gmail.com. 

Click here to see the questions and photos from our session.