MACUL Conference

Last week, I had the privilege of going to the MACUL Conference. I attended the following sessions.

• Blogging Before Breakfast: Global publishers (Meg Ormiston)
• Choose Your Own Adventure (Mark Lada)
• Establish a Successful Student Tech Assistant Program In Your School (Ronald Knopf)
• Computer Projects Using MS Office and the Web (Todd Toporski)
• All Online (Kristin Furdak)
• Weblogs in Schools (Will Richardson)
• New Internet Literacies (Will Richardson)
• RSS: The New "Killer App" for Educators (Will Richardson)
  

Meg Ormiston presented material showing how blogs can be used to encourage students to read, write, edit, and publish. Students can be provided input from anywhere in the world including book authors. Meg shared material from David Warlick and Will Richardson.

Mark Lada teaches Middle School Students. The students do lots of research on the Internet to do the writing assigned to them. One of their assignments is the "Choose Your Own Adventure". Their stories have multiple choice endings (that are linked) so the reader can choose his own ending.

Ronald Knopf did not arrive to do his session. The attendees stayed and had a round robin discussion of "Establish a Successful Student Tech Assistant Program In Your School". Desktop assistants seemed to be the preference because of the risk of allowing students to tamper with hardware.

Todd Toporski showed us samples of projects his students had completed using technology and the internet. The educational possibilities were unlimited.

Kristin Furdak is the Coordinator of Instructional Technology and Media Services for Livingston ESA. Her presentation "All Online" was designed to show the abundant resources available to the student and educator.

• Google
• Free Foto
• Awesome Clipart
• Clusty
• Teoma

Each session had a good presenter. However, Will Richardson led the way with his knowledge of and experience with the material. In the high school where he teaches, web logs are used extensively for newsletters, school assignments, and even web pages. The school web page system is a series of blogs linked together. He talked about RSS (real simple syndication). He showed how to use feeds to collect news, data and research. He introduced us to wikkis (and Wikkipedia). Wikkis can be used to teach students to read, write, and edit. He showed us the potential of podcasts (brodcasting to I-Pods of persons who have subscribed to your podcast).

I am still processing the material that I learned last week. The use of the blog solved one of my web page problems at Northglade (the ability to post the Monday Express from school without waiting until I get home at night). This summary of my MACUL experience is in the form of a blog. I hope the links are helpful to someone.