christa mcauliffe conference

This week I attended the 2005 Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference. This yearly event is sponsored by NHSTE (New Hampshire Society for Technolgy Education). This conference is by no means for “tech people” - it’s for all educators.

Tuesday’s keynote speech was given by Marc Prensky, a leading authority on the educational merits of online interactive games. He has labeled our kids “digital natives” since they’ve grown up with technology. That makes us “digital immigrants” – people who have moved from the “Old World” into this new world our kids can navigate so well. Prensky talked about how many of the skills and strategies that kids learn in order to succeed in gaming are many of the same skills we want them to learn in school. He talked about engagement being more important than content learning because engagement is what leads to motivation and helps kids continue to learn. Prensky believes that most of the 21st century learning that our kids will need to know to be successful in the future is not happening in our schools as much as it’s happening after school – when kids are interacting with technology. He showed us clips from some of the games, where players build characters, interact with other players’ characters, and work individually and as cohorts to complete tasks. Lots of opportunities for problem-solving and decision-making. Amazing stuff.

Kathy Schrock presented on the value of using primary source materials with students. Primary sources are actual records (letters, photos, artifacts) that have survived from the past. She has an extensive list of primary source material (secondary, too) on her website here. I loved this quote she used from Thomas Jefferson in 1871: “A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.”

Annette Lamb was here today. She’s an entertaining speaker with a wealth of online information. Her presentation was about using testing results to support the transformation of learning environments. She listed a dozen reoccurring problems kids have across grades and subject areas:
- Identifying main ideas
- Identifying relationships and making connections
- Sequencing events
- Identifying details
- Distinguishing fact from opinion
- Identifying cause and effect
- Comparing and contrasting viewpoints
- Defending a position
- Identifying the problem and solution
- Making predictions
- Making inferences
- Drawing conclusions
And she talked about how using technology (webquests, virtual field trips, online tools) with kids can address all those areas and more and gave us an extensive list of online resources. You can find many of them on her website, Eduscapes.

By the way, she showed us a wonderful model of professional development, where teachers worked in the summer to build technology infused lessons, then established a tech camp for kids so they could try them out and tweak them before the school year began. They even had kids make suggestions for improvement and take photos or draw pictures to supplement the presentation of the lessons.

Finally, an amazing piece of technology that’s new to me. It’s called a “Playaway” and it’s a single audiobook loaded on an mp3 player. It comes with earbuds and runs on AA batteries. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Chronicles of Narnia are the only children’s literature on Playaways and, in total there are only about thirty other titles available. But, hey, it’s only been out for a few months! And just when I joined audible.com… Playaways are a huge technological innovation. Think about it – it’s the first time any electronic media has been sold complete with the player!

More to come. David Thornburg is speaking Thursday and I still have many notes to go through!