Education ∪ Math ∪ Technology

Tag: ISTE 2010 (page 1 of 1)

Final reflection: ISTE 2010

The ISTE conference is over, and I’m finally able to unwind and get a chance to reflect on the experience.  The conference was awesome for many reasons, but there was a reoccurring theme that happened during the conference, which to me was the most important part of the conference.

When I first submitted my proposal to my school to attend this conference, I realized I would have to try and keep my budget down so I volunteered to stay with relatives of mine who live in Boulder.  My school happily accepted this compromise, and paid for my registration and airfare.  Unfortunately, it turned out that my relatives, who were originally able to put me up, were going to have to be out of town during the conference, and this meant that my free place to stay was no longer available.  Ugh.  I posted a request on Twitter for some help finding a place to stay, and within a couple of hours, @cindybuchanan generously volunteered half of her hotel room.  First connection made.

We met at the airport on Saturday, using Twitter to confirm out location, and picked up our bags.  Cindy had rented a car, so we went and picked it up, then drove to her hotel.  We stashed our stuff, thanked the staff for providing the spare roll-away bed, and went out to get a bite to eat and get to know each other.  Yeah, I spent the entire ISTE conference sleeping in the hotel room of a stranger, although of course by the end of the conference, we were friends.

Marlowe Tweet-up

Sunday, we slept in a bit, then headed to the first Tweet-up of the conference for us, at Marlowe’s.  We got a chance to hang out and meet people, and I met @mbteach, who is a huge part of #edchat on Twitter.  They had some awesome t-shirts with <nerd> on the front, and </nerd> on the back, which I really wished I remembered to purchase in advance.  Very cool.  If you have to ask why it’s cool, you aren’t a nerd.  I also met @geraldaungst and @kylepace here and many other Tweeps.  Second connection made.

Nerd Shirts

That night we went to the Wells Fargo theatre in the Denver convention centre for the conference kick-off which was pretty funny.  Pretty silly, but definitely worth going.  We went outside and headed our separate ways for reasons which I don’t remember, and I missed the keynote address.  Well not really, I was outside the theatre at the Blogger’s cafe trying to watch it on the screen, but the speaker was being lambasted so much it was difficult to do.  Fortunately @dwarlick posted a mind-map summary of the keynote, which turned out to be much easier to understand than the actual keynote.

Cindy and I met up at the Hard Rock Cafe where we got to participate in another Tweet-up.  We got the opportunity to hang out and chat over some beers.  There were a lot of other people here from Twitter, including @angelamaiers and we made another connection. Cindy and I were pretty exhausted though, so we headed back to the hotel and got excited about starting the actual workshops on Monday.  

Monday I participated in an early morning session on tablet PC’s in the classroom which I’ve blogged about on here already, and also the 10 Pitfalls to Implementing Open Source, run by Revolution Linux.  Both of these sessions were great, as was the time I spent during the day intermittently at the Blogger’s cafe.  In the afternoon I volunteered at the Twitter table at the Social Media playground, and converted 10 people into Tweeps.  It’s not hard, the argument is pretty simple and I’m sure most of you will have heard it before so I won’t repeat it here.

After a session on using Google Sketch-up for Beginners, Cindy and I met up again and went out to dinner at a Tex-Mex style restaurant before going to TEDxDenverEd.  The TED conference was great, lots of fun listening to all of these great speakers.  I know some people complained that they wanted a wider set of ideas, but to be honest my expectations were met completely.  I was very impressed with all of the speakers, even if I knew I wouldn’t be able to use all of the ideas myself.  We got to participate in a social justice idea brainstorming session which was lots of fun, listen to some more speeches, and then we got to go home.  Cindy also won a classroom response system made by Qwizdom which was very exciting.

TEDxDenverEd solutions activity

I spent my morning on Tuesday checking out the exhibit hall, and hanging out at the Blogger’s cafe.  I submitted an application to the @inFocusEdu booth and won an interactive LCD projector.  I was super pumped about this, and happy that inFocus was willing to ship the projector directly to my school.  At the drawing, I ran into Dr Fred Mednick, the founder of Teachers Without Borders.  He was one of the speakers at the @TEDxDenverEd conference, and I invited him out to lunch.  We had a great discussion about education, and technology in education, and how these major conferences always seem to stray toward the use of the gadgets and away from our primary purpose, which is teaching kids.  This was a great connection that I made, and I am hoping I can find more time to participate in his program.

I then listened to a lecture by Jeff Lao on designing a successful 1 to 1 program which was pretty fascinating, if only because of the detail Jeff went into.  Jeff works for the state of Maine, and has helped set up the very successful 1 to 1 Macbook program that Maine uses.  I’m pretty impressed that an entire state is 1 to 1, and it gives me hope that the future of other states, and my own Canadian provinces will follow in their footsteps.

#edchat was being held live at ISTE, in the Social Butterfly lounge, but to be honest it ended up being a disappointment.  Everyone was on their laptops and the discussions that I would have liked to have had in person about education never really materialized, despite my efforts to engage a few of the isolated groups participating.  On reflection, I would probably have much preferred the session that @teachpaperless went to, on Games, MMOS, and Virtual Worlds.

Tuesday evening Cindy and I went to the @simplek12 Tweet-up for dinner, had some fun hanging out for a bit, but then bailed early because we were both so exhausted.  We went back to the hotel room, and I got a chance to finally reconnect with my wife for a bit, and put a little bit of work into my Masters degree, then I connected with my online gaming buddies and played an online game for a bit.

Wednesday went by pretty quickly.  The only session I really enjoyed was on using Blender in the classroom and most people at the session had difficulty.  For me, it was a great opportunity to get introduced to the program, and learn enough so I can get started on some more complicated projects.  Once this ended, I rushed to the keynote address by Jeff Piontek, which was excellent, but for me was a restatement of a lot of ideas I was already aware of and agree with.

The highlight of Wednesday was by far having dinner with @teachpaperless where we totally connected about some action that needed to be taken in education.  Shelley’s big idea was that we need to bring together people from all areas of education and have them work out a solution, rather than relying on a largely unsuccessful top-down approach.  Bring in people from the top educational management, the leaders of educational technology, teachers, students, parents, and government officials and have them work out some concrete solutions to the problem of educational reform.  Interestingly it looks like British Columbia, my home province, might be doing just that.

Cindy, me, and Shelley

This conference for me was all about the connections that I made.  I may forget what was covered in the workshops, in the keynote addresses, or in the many tweets that I read, but I will never forget the people that I met, and the impact they have had on my thinking about education.

How to Design a Successful 1-to-1 Program

At a presentation on building a successful 1 to 1 program in a school district.  Presentation will be aired here eventually – http://www.mlti.org/presentations.  Just writing down notes for now, as I have a lot to digest.  This session was awesome, I strongly recommend you watch the entire presentation later if you weren’t able to come in person.

The first point the presenter talked about was that focusing on the teacher is the wrong goal.  You want to focus on the learning the students will do, rather than the way the technology works.  The details about logistics, etc… have to be framed in the context of the student use of the devices.  Teachers need to be thought of as a partner with the students so that they gain training as well as the students.

Presenter is using actual examples from a classroom about why a 1 to 1 program is helpful and effective.  He used an example of how you could teach the American Revolution in an American History class, but then share the learning with a class in Britain who are learning about the Rebellion.  This was a great example of something that cannot be done using traditional tools.

Great example from the presenter on how not to turn technology into a tool.  Students have to have a back-up device so that they are never without a laptop.  Ask for a solution, not a price quote.  Ask for what the devices should be able to do, rather than the minimum technical specs the devices should be able to do. Use one service provider this way you will only have 1 phone call to make whenever anything goes wrong in your building.  

Focus on tool-based software, software assurances includes.  Apple builds the image for their systems to make sure that it works.  Keep the way you handle your logistics simple.  Trying to do updates over a network might be easier for the IT professional, but it will take too long to do with a large image size.  Use a thumb drive to update the systems, it can be as short as 18 minutes to reimage a single computer.

No servers, no domains, no AD/OD. Each student authenticates to their individual computer, rather than to a single location.  Setting up backups is a separate issue which can be done using a different system fairly easily.  Stop trying to fix individual student problems, reimage the computers when there are problems and have the students rely on their backups.

Have spare devices, send the computer off for repair, give the students the spare devices, put their work on the spare computer, and then send them on their way.  Need fast turnaround on repairs.  Look at trends on what needs to be repaired which will help keep costs down.

"If Deborah keeps bringing in her computer in Swahili every 3 weeks, it can be useful to have kept track of this so that you can help individual users."

Things will get damaged out of warranty.  Most insurance plans do not cover vandalism for laptops.  Make sure to follow the rules of the insurance.  For large organizations like Maine, the cost of vandalism insurance on each laptop would be more than the cost of replacing the vandalized devices during the year.

Build your building first, put the furniture first, then build the wireless network.  The furniture can interfere with your settings and wireless coverage.  If you want to ensure you have sufficient coverage and you haven’t built your school yet, run cable everywhere as this is fairly cheap.  You can always choose later which cable needs to be used once you have the furniture in the building.

The tighter your [internet] filter, the less happy your students and teachers will be.  Try and teach digital citizenship rather than focus on restricting what the students can do. Look at software installation, what can be installed, what can. Who should run updates, who shouldn’t.

Make sure to share your leadership and vision with all stake holders, including administrators, teachers, parents, students, IT professionals, 

Being an Exhibitor is Frustrating

 I wandered into the Exhibition hall at ISTE 2010 briefly today.  I could only really stand about 30 minutes in that room, it was rather overwhelming.  As I wandered around, I realized that the vast majority of the stalls with vendors in them seemed empty.  In fact, most people were gathered around a few larger vendors and many of the smaller vendors looked pretty bored.

The problem is that we have SO much choice of what to look at that many of us couldn’t decide.  There were hundreds (if not thousands) of people wandering around the hall window shopping at different vendors, and hardly anyone stopping to find out more, except like I said at a few of the larger vendors.  Adobe, Promethean, etc… could draw customers to their booth through the power of the reputation they have developed but the smaller vendors did not have this option.

My thought about this is that they all looked the same from the outside.  "Hey look, we have some limited solution to a tiny problem your schools have and we want some of your money."  This was the refrain of 90% of the vendors in the exhibition hall.

Here’s a recommendation for next year: bring in some students from your partner schools and have THEM demonstrate the technology in practice. If your product doesn’t lend itself well to student demonstrations, then there is a problem with your product, and maybe an exhibition hall isn’t the right place to share it.

If you are going to rely on a poor practice for sharing work, I think you should expect poor results. 

How not to Present a Keynote

This year’s keynote was awful.  The way the presenter talked, the disconnect between what he talked about and what most of us are here for, and the use of his PowerPoint slides was just horrendous.  Here’s a mindmap, created by @dwarlick (click on it to open the full image in a new window).

Keynote Summary

It doesn’t actually seem to me, from viewing this slide, that his actual message is all that bad.  Basically, there are huge problems in the world, and the current world structure can’t solve those problems.  If I had a captive audience of educators, this might be something I’d like to talk about too.  I mean after all, we are going to be educating the future leaders of the world.

The problem was the way he presented it was totally inappropriate.  He used a very poor PowerPoint presentation which he READ from to a room full of people who are easily distracted (because we are teachers) and unimpressed with poor presentation skills.  We know how to captivate audiences, and what he did was anything but captivating.  Here’s a sample slide, so you understand how bad it was (Thanks @web20classroom).

Slide from keynote

I’d like to say that the response from the audience, while probably accurately describing his presentation, was a bit harsh.  Maybe people on Twitter on the #ISTE10 channel were expressing concern about their own presentations tomorrow.  My recommendation to them, don’t follow #ISTE10 during or shortly after your presentation if you have any self-esteem at all and want to keep it.  I’d love to have seen a few more supportive folks, but the typical crowd mentality of "okay he’s down now let’s jump on him" cropped up yet again and pretty much everyone was negative.  Let’s try and avoid this kind of negativity for each other’s presentations in the next few days, shall we?