Today I went to an ITEC conference (Iowa Technology Education Connection). One of my favorite things that the keynote speaker said was that a great leader was knowledgable, trustworthy and generous with their time. She said that technology needs to be 'people-centric'.
I went to Vendor Hall, where they had all kinds of great technology from Smart Boards to battery back-up systems to keyboards and software. My favorite was a new document camera called a 'Lady Bug' that is more well designed, in my opinion, than the one I have used. The price for the least expensive one is two hundred some dollars. I Will encourage some of the teachers I know to apply for a grant to get one. I'd like to see more of these in classrooms.
I took a flier to show some people.
My favorite workshop was called 'Gadgets!'. I learned about a lot of new programs like Google Talk, which will turn notes into a document using optical character recognition. I took note of a way to send RSS feeds to myself, such as newspaper articles on particular subjects. They stressed that Twitter was a good educational tool, and it could be used to feed updates to a website using Widgets.
I went to a workshop called 'What's New from Apple'. I was disappointed in this session, which was more geared for authorized purchasers from schools.
I look forward to going again tomorrow. I'll know my way around a bit better and I'll be able to enjoy even more technical gadget information! I really do love technology!!!!
After the conference I went to Mount Vernon to meet with the ELP teacher about EIE kits. She was interested in one of them, so I left the manual for her to read. I also told her that I might want to work with the fourth graders so that students outside of ELP(Extended Learning Opportunities...which is the gifted and talented class for Mount Vernon) also got to experience EIE (Engineering is Elementary).
