Tech Expo 2007 Report
I had the pleasure to spend the day at the Tech Expo 2007 Conference hosted by the Lower Hudson RIC (Westchester County, New York).
While I have been a part of the Web 2.0/Read-Write web community for most of the last year and have greatly benefitted by blogging and being blogged (so to speak), it was very exciting to be with a group of educators actually dealing with bringing ourselves and our students into a new world.
And I saw and heard some amazing things from other teachers. There was a Middle School Spanish teacher, Faith Braut who is doing some really great things with podcasts with both her Spanish and ESL students. She even does testing via iPods. Check it out! There was a High School teacher, Geoff Curtis who is using podcasting to engage students in Current Issues in Education.
One of the keynote speakers, Hall Davidson, whose enthusiasm was completely infectious, challenged us to work with our students using the tools already in their pockets - cell phones and iPods especially. He carried the flag for empowering them to be citizen journalists and using their cell phones to record podcasts (via Gcast), take photos (via flickr and others), and shoot video (via youtube and others). He even did a nifty live demonstration of gcast, having an audience member call and create a podcast. All in about a minute or two. Literally.
The other keynote speaker, David Jakes, talked about what makes a new technology “sticky.” What was particularly impressive to me was that he had his presentation already posted to his wiki, so I could follow along on my laptop, checking out links and other ideas as he spoke.
The bottom line for me was finding myself inspired by great teaching. People, educators bringing themselves fully to their students. People just like me. A community.
Like I said, inspiring.
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