NECC Update - From Tuesday

This was a busy day and I really was lamenting having left the power supply for my laptop in Michigan. I went to several sessions yesterday and enjoyed all of them.

The first session of the day for me was one hosted by Apple, Free Learning Content from A-Z. This was mainly a session on finding good educational podcasts. The new thing for me was the Apple Learning Interchange, a social network like interface for browsing a set of lessons created by teachers for Apple. It's worth a look.

Next I went to the SIGILT (Innovative Learning Technologies Special Interest Group) business meeting. This was actually cool. This SIG is only two years old and is still trying to find its way. The main goal is to find and bring together research on the effectiveness emerging technologies have on education. More on this later.

After the SIGILT meeting I ran to the Social Networking Pannel. This was pretty cool there was a great group for this and the first thing they did was start the back channel chat. There were a lot of really good points made, but I frankly can't remember them all. So I'll just put in what it made me think about.

1. Most people, including educators, fixate on the dangers of social networking and how kids use it very inappropriately. We need to constantly remind people that just as we have policies in our classrooms to enforce order and appropriate behavior we need to have policies for online behavior as well.
2. I should figure out all the privacy issues in Facebook, how to open open up my profile and how to it down.
3. I may want to also create a physics group in Facebook to parallel what we do on Ning. The kids are on Facebook, so I may want to have a presence there as well.

After this I ran down to the big theater for Hall Davidson's Cell Phone talk. It was great, but very similar to the keynote talk from MACUL in March, so I didn't walk away with much new stuff. But I did think a bit more about how I use my cell phone and how I should stat using it. I need to be more comfortable with what I can do with my phone so that I can teach my students about the powerful tool most of them cary around in their pockets.

Then I had to un to the othe side of the conference hall to catch the Classroom 2.0 Birds of a Feather meet up. I would summarize it here, but you'll get a better idea by going to the forum post on this session. The highlight for me was getting to share the stage with David Warlick, er I mean Clovis.