Actem Conference Notes

Hello - This past Friday I attended the ACTEM Conference at the Augusta Civic Center and shared some of my findings at Tuesday's Technology meeting. More from ACTEM Conference will be posted here. What follows are thoughts, summaries, ideas, links to resources, etc...

Essential Question of the Week will be a weekly question for teachers at AHS to make comments and suggestions: I have seen an increased use in Inspiration software this week. WoW! Awesome! Could teachers who are using this software answer/comment why and how we are using it and share it with the community?

See Will Richarson ACTEM Conference 2007 keynote speaker notes at the following link - http://willrichardson.wikispaces.com/

A personal pondering generated during the ACTEM Conference: We need to meet the students in their world not in ours. And why would we neglect doing this? What is their world? It is a socially interactive and connected one.

Teach: Wikipedia, MySpace, Gmail, YouTube, Gaming?

Why wikipedia: It teaches students to contribute a growing, changing, adapting learning project; they become editors, they become publishers; and most importantly they become evaluator and authenticators of online information - thus they become information literate.

Why Myspace? It offers more than smut. Let's teach students how tap invaluable resources and how to keep safe.

See Jim Moulton's BEST OF THE WEB here http://jimmoulton.org/pdfsites20.pdf. Brenda P. loves this site.
Also as a guide to technology integration I will use this site
Perhaps Jim could consult us on improving our technology use?

Another pondering: Should pedagogy influence technology - or vice versa?

At school: This week Harold I made great progress toward Text to Speech and Speech to Text use. View his Inspiration brainstorming mind map. It is not a final copy so anyone is welcomed to get it from the Netrwork folders and add to it.

TheStudent Led Conference committee is looking at the potential of Google Docs for electronic Portfolios. Visit Google Docs and come to the next PLP meeting and chime in with ideas.

This week it was brought to my attention that students could change teacher worksheets in the computer directory Network Folders. Luke and Tanner fixed this problem. If however you want students to manipulate work in your folders you can permit them. They can put thier work in their as well.

Lauri and Bill received the motherload of Science Curriculums this week. We viewed some of it - interactive dvd's with labs is just one piece of it. Go to Bill's classroom andcheck it out because it reveals great ways to integrate technology.


Will all high school teachers get laptops. Visit http://www.mainelearns.org/story_detail?story_id=738

Websites that help students:
Readplease.com: http://www.readplease.com/ Reads any text you see on your screen - all purpose text-to-speech software
Merriam-webster dictionary http://m-w.com/. How might this assist your classes?