ICE Conference
Last week I attended the Illinois Computer Educator’s (ICE) Conference in St. Charles, IL. This is the second year I attended the conference. Last year, I went to a pre-conference workshop on how to use pivot tables in Excel, which was interesting, but this year I attended the actual conference. They are many sessions to choose from, and I chose to focus mostly on sessions about new web 2.0 tools (which aren’t all actually web 2.0) and how to implement them.
On a side note, I would like to define web 2.0. Web 2.0 technologies are technologies that utilize two-way information. For example, a blog is a web 2.0 technology. I can make a post about a topic, and someone else can post back. I wiki is a web 2.0 tool. We can all work together to create a document. It is not a new kind of internet, but a new way of thinking about the internet as explained by wikipedia:
The term first became notable after the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web. According to Tim O’Reilly:
Web 1.0 was either me posting information or me reading information. (One way communication.) Web 3.0 looks like it will be people’s attempt to make money off of web 2.0 technologies (like Facebook and Twitter.)
The first three session I went to were all about web applications and free websites to use in your classroom. Overall I found the information to be overwhelming. There are so many awesome tools out there that I don’t even know how I would have time to test them all out and remember to use them. A problem I often have is that I find a really cool program, but then forget about it later when it would perhaps be helpful.
One was called the Free Software Circus. This presentation first highlighted some new sites I hadn’t heard of and the several free and open source programs (FOSS) I had heard of. The man giving the presenation, Dr. Philip Lacey, said something very interesting that I will use again. He said that it takes at least 25 instances for a teacher to become comfortable enough with a program to realistically teach with it. Here is a link to the circus, it really does have a nice list of products/site.
SoftwareCircus ?(Phil Lacey’s Ed Tech Arena)? via kwout
The other session I went too focused on this idea too. The presenter there gave us approx 7 sites to view all of which were free web tools. One exampe is the program I used above, kwout, to cut that image off of another website and paste it to my blog. The imagine is a link and it is also hotmapped with other links if they are in the picture.
The conference was good and I am glad I went. I think I may try to present next year on something involving Moodle, but I am not sure yet. The conference really has got me thinking about how we need to change the way we educate to take into account the technolgies we have available. I was just telling my students today that they live in a golden age of information where the collective knowledge of the world is at their fingertips and they need to take advantage of it. As educators, I am pretty sure we are not taking advantage of it, and we need to figure out how to change what we do adapt to the world before it passes us by.
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Tags: ICE09, Internet, technology, Web 2.0
