It was great to start off my ISTE conference with David Warlick. A good friend of mine, Janice Friesen, introduced David to me at my first ISTE five years ago. Janice was trying to get me to use David’s site for blogging with students Classblogmeister. He has been integrating technology for a long time now, and is an innovator in the field of edtech. David gave a bunch of resources which I had not used before, and had stories to go along with every resource. If you ever get the chance, you have to see him present.
One story he told really stuck with me about a school from Canada collaborating together in an interesting way. There was a field trip that second graders from Westglen School took to Fort Edmonton. Fort Edmonton is a historical site that tries to keep with the time period of the era when it was relevant. The second graders returned and were going to research the modes of transportation from that time period. The created an image in MS Paint of the mode of transportation. The fourth graders visited next, and they were to draw two different backdrops for the second grade drawings, using MS Paint. To finish off the project the second graders wrote to some tenth graders in a hypermedia class, so they could illustrate the drawings. The high schoolers finished, and the projects were shown at the elementary school at an assembly. I think that is terrific collaboration and I wish we could do projects like that all the time.
Here are the other links to check out that David mentioned in his session.
Links:
Colearners Cracking The Native Code – Warlick’s website that links to presentation
Colearners – The website for Warlick’s other presentations
Knitterchats – The backchannel used during the session with transcript
Social Media Counts App – Links to iTunes App that counts how much social media is used
Doodlebuzz – Very interesting search engine that you just have to try
Scratch – MIT site that helps kids create games with basic programming
ipadsammy School Scribbles 