Hi all you techies and wanna be's. I am in the latter category as this is my first post to a real blog. Not a blog I had hoped I would post to, or planned to post to and didn't, but a real blog. I am just coming off my high from attendance at NCCE and am revelling in all the ideas that are swirling around in my wanna be a tech brain.



Perhaps the most helpful and interesting sessions I attended were Jennifer Gingerich's "Digital Kits for Differentiation and Engagement", presenter Asale Harris, "Making the 21st Century Classroom a Reality" and Karen Fasimpauer's, "Open Educational Resources".


Jennifer showed us how to make a digital toolkit using online resources. She magically weaves the resources into organized media folders. She showed us the best sites to get downloads to make a topic come alive with slids shows, sound, song, streaming video and images. (Photo Story, PowerPoint, IMovie, and Inspiration are some of the star players). Freeplaymusic.com gives you amazing background music, Findsounds.com aids in finding other cool sounds, and even You Tube for cool video clips to enhance any topic. For more information go to web.mac.com/jennifergingerich


Karen Fasimpauer took us a on tour through teaching and learning web tools. She taught how to share remix and learn and do it all without copyright issues. We explored Open licenses http://www.creativecommons.org Open tools like http://www.mediawiki.org, www.openoffice.org, audacity.sourceforge.net Open audio http://www.ccmixter.org, http://www.musopen.com, and Open photo, clip art and vidoe content www.flickr.com/creativecommons, http://www.openphoto.net. For more information visit www.k12opened.com


Asale Harris from Eduscape Learning showed how to use document cameras, interactive white boards or slates and student response tools to make learning interactive and fun.


And if that wasn't enough, I won a free 5 seat license for a year of Elluminate Live! Now all I need to do is learn how to use and give it away to a teacher....Any takers.

Be well and be a techy!
Karen SS