the media window

I went to the MEMO conference this weekend. Not only was it in the lovely Brainerd area with beautiful fall color, it was a very worthwhile conference for me, and I hope to be able to share many of the valuable insights I gained there. The following are just the technology related sessions I learned from.

• In the first session I attended I learned more about podcasting. This is a growing area of technology, and while I am interested in it, I have not ventured into the realm of using it in the classroom. I did get information on free audio editing software that is available called Audacity.
• I attended a few sessions on SmartBoard technology. The information in these sessions was good because I learned that as long as there is one SmartBoard in your district, you can download and use SMART Notebook software. I am excited about that, because once it’s downloaded to your computer, you can use it with projector and an Airliner tablet and do many of the tasks of a SmartBoard without actually having one! This will undoubtedly be more advantageous to those schools with a number of projectors already in hand, but I am looking forward to seeing what we can do at my building.
• Another session I attended helped me to learn more about using Google. I was already familiar with and had used GoogleDocs which is a great tool that allows a group of people to edit a document online in real time. The beauty of it is you don’t have to be together to do the editing. This summer I took an online course and used GoogleDocs to collaborate with another media specialist who was taking the course with me. We were able to develop our lesson plan assignments together, add our instructor as a contributor and have him view our work! Very slick. What was new to me was Google’s custom search engines. This is a way to limit the websites that Google will search, which could be useful for teachers and students. If you limit the websites, you eliminate the potentially confusing array that a student encounters while researching a particular subject. You should create a separate Google account for your school and not use your own Google account if you plan to use it with your students. I may use this in the future and have classified the knowledge in the “good to know” category.
• The fourth session I attended was facilitated by Doug Johnson, a nationally recognized leader in media and technology from our state of Minnesota. He currently maintains a blog that is always interesting and informative called “Blue Skunk Blog“. His talk on “Policies 2.0: Rules of the Social Web” was informative and thought-provoking. The questions that arose for me had most to do with the concept of intellectual freedom. In a nutshell, I believe that intellectual freedom is essential, but as a teacher of young students I feel there is a responsibility on my part to provide an environment of safe learning for those in my charge. I always feel more comfortable checking out websites or downloading the pictures I may need from Google images myself ahead of time and linking to them for the students to access and learn from the lesson I want to teach. It saves time and potential back-tracking from objectionable or useless material. I feel that the challenge now is to locate Web 2.0 platforms that are “education friendly” and relevant to the classroom. One website I became interested in is Teachertube. As the months go by, there is more and more education relevant content added to this site. Check it out if you haven’t done so yet!
• The last session I attended was a Web 2.0 session. I learned some important bits of information , but I must admit that I felt the facilitator was holding back somehow. The first 10 to 15 minutes of the presentation was pretty much preaching to the choir on the necessity of integrating technology into the curriculum. I was ready for more sooner. The best websites that were shared in that session were the following: zamzar.com which allows you to convert all sorts of files into another format, gcast.com which is a place to use your telephone to create free podcasts, and gliffy.com which is a place to draw and share diagrams on the web.

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