Expanding Your NECC 2009 Experience

View and edit NECC 2009 Washington, DC in a larger map. Please add your recommendations!

It's that time of year again... The International Society for Technology in Education will celebrate its 30th birthday in a few weeks by hosting the National Educational Computing Conference in Washington, D.C. For me, it's a particularly exciting time to be visiting our nation's capital in light of our new president and a renewed focus on improving education.

NECC 2009 promises to be professionally rejuvenating event for anyone interested in educational technology. It is a potentially overwhelming conference with nearly 13,000 attendees and approximately 500 vendors presenting their wares. For the record, educational technology has never been about the tools for me (although I do revel in the cool factor of many technologies), but about leveraging learning for kids. That said, I hope that educators from a wide variety of backgrounds and interests will attend for similar reasons. I would actually like to see the excitement about educational technology filter down more to those who aren't necessarily techie geeks like myself.

For the past few years, I've posted a blog entry highlighting a few tips and tricks for making the most of your NECC experience. Review my ideas for 2007 and for 2008; I still stand by that general advice. Pick an area of focus, spend time planning before you get to Washington with that theme in mind, and give yourself plenty of time to digest everything. Bring your laptop for taking notes and accessing additional content; I suspect more people will be using iPhones for this purpose, however. Finally, get connected with other educators through the plethora of events that are scheduled. For the second year, ISTE has an online community for conference conversation. Networking isn't just for job seekers or administrators anymore!

If you are not able to attend in person, you should be able to participate virtually as well. Some presenters may elect to post their materials online and to stream video feeds of their presentations. At Edubloggercon, an informal "unconference" to be held Saturday, June 27 as a precursor to NECC, many sessions will also be broadcast via tools such as Ustream. Finally, similar sessions called NECC Unplugged will be taking place in the Blogger's Café during the actual conference at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.

In addition to all this, people will be blogging, posting pictures, and twittering away about conference happenings. You can find this stuff by searching various sources using tags (keyword labels) such as NECC, NECC2009, and NECC09. For instance, search Twitter using #NECC and you'll find a steady microblogging stream. I recommend searching Technorati for blog posts and Flickr for photos in a similar manner.

Finally, I like to make the most of any travel experience by doing a little research ahead of time. I usually do a cursory search in iTunes for content related to my destination that I can put on my iPod or iPhone. For instance, I purchased the audiobook of A Cricket in Times Square for my daughter when we traveled to New York City prior to NECC 2005. In 2006, I traveled to Europe with other Apple Distinguished Educators on a project and I brought along a Passport to Europe episode on Berlin and a No Reservations episode on Paris (this show isn't necessarily for kids, by the way). In addition to these items, there are tons of free podcasts available in iTunes if you do a search for your particular destination.

I've taken the liberty of putting together a few Washington DC related resources. I have not reviewed all of these; I just explored and plucked ones that look potentially interesting. If you have any additional recommendations, please add them to the comments. Enjoy and see you in DC. I'll be in the Google booth from time to time and presenting as part of Larry Anderson's Podcasting and Podcatching for the Absolute Beginner panel. Stop by and say hello!

Washington DC and NECC Resources

Lucy's NECC Calendar - Each year, I use the NECC conference planner to plot any sessions interesting to me. I'm focusing on math, science and interactive whiteboards this year.

Lucy's NECC '09 Map - Join this Google Map and add your info and recommendations.

NECC Ning - NECC's online community; attendees and virtual attendees are welcome to join.

GovFresh - one stop shopping for multimedia produced by the U.S. governent. Everything is aggregated in one place; web 2.0 at its finest!

Apps for your iPhone:

• iTransDC Metro - (99 cents)
• iMetroMap DC (99 cents)
  
• Dubbele.com (99 cents)
• Washington DC Public (free)
• Washington Post's Going Out Guide (free)
• Washington DC Travel Guide (99 cents)
• Washington DC - GPS Tour (99 cents)
  
• U.S Historical Documents (99 cents)
  
• iCongress (99 cents)
  
• politicoTrack ($9.99)
  
• Presidents Match Game (99 cents)
  
• USA Presidents (free)

Podcasts:

• Cityscapes - Washington DC
• Tourcaster - Washington DC City Guide
• Mobile Tours
• Cultural Tourism DC: Audio Journeys
• Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Podcasts
• ARTSEDGE: The Kennedy Center's Jazz in DC
• The International Spy Museum SpyCast
• US Holocaust Memorial Museum iTunes U Page
• Smithsonian Podcasts
• LearnOutLoud's US Presidents Podcast
• The Washington Post Video Podcast
• Washington Week Video Podcast
• President Obama's Weekly Address

TV Shows and Movies:

• Smithsonian Channel ($1.99 per episode to purchase)
• Anthony Bourdrain's No Reservations - Washington DC ($1.99 per episode to purchase)
• All the President's Men ($9.99 to purchase, $2.99 to rent)
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington ($14.99 to purchase only)

YouTube Channels:

• Smithsonian Channel
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Newseum
• Library of Congress
• C-SPAN
• The White House

Friday Five - Finding Ada (Role Models of Women in Tech)

How quickly can you answer the question "Who are the leading women in tech?"

This week's Friday Five will not only help you anwer this question, but will also challenge you to contribute to the number of female role models students and adults are exposed to as they explore the areas of science, technology, engineering and math. (often referred to as S.T.E.M.)

How many of you had Ada Lovelace's name at the tip of your tongue?

Ada Lovelace wrote the world's first computer program for the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that Charles Babbage had invented. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software. Ada died an early death in 1852 at the age of 36 and never had a chance to explore her understanding of computing. The high level computer language "Ada" developed by the U.S. Department of Defense was named after her.

If you were not familiar with Ada's significant contribution to the computer world or had trouble naming at least 10 leading women in tech, this week's Friday Five will serve you well. It includes a list of sites where you can easily locate names, pictures, stories of female role models to share with your students or colleagues. And best of all the list is about to expand exponentially!

March 24, 2009 has been designated as Ada LoveLace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. On that day, thousands of bloggers have pledged to publish a blog post about a women in tech who they admire using the tag AdaLovelaceDay09 for Delicious, Technorati etc. or #ALD09 for Twitter.

The data continues to show that the challenge of attracting women into technology related careers continues. While the causes are complex and the solutions are many, everyone agrees that female role models have a huge impact on the career choices of girls.

“Outstanding women can function as inspirational examples of success,
illustrating the kinds of achievements that are possible for women around them.
They demonstrate that it is possible to overcome traditional gender barriers,
indicating to other women that high levels of success are indeed attainable”,
(Penelope Lockwood, University of Toronto)

One of the most rewarding activities I organize to provide girls exposure to female role models year are the Power Lunch with Women in Tech offered at annual TechSavvyGirls activities. The female role models who attend continue to talk about the value they feel being able to offer advice and inspiration to girls in their formative years. Not only do the girls leave the luncheon with enough pictures, audio, and video to create a webpage about their new role model, but they often refer back to the advice and inspiration they received that day in 'college applications', 'scholarship applications' or in their own mentoring of younger students.

If you desire to organize an activity that will connect girls to role models face to face, organizations like the Society of Women Engineers , AAUW, or other networks of women are great resources for role models. The National Girls Collaborative can help you get started by providing resources, a program directory of organizations and projects and mini grants to support collaborative projects between organizations. The Anita Borg Foundation Tech Bridge Program has compiled a fantastic guide called Get Involved to help prospective role models inspire girls in technology filled with practical suggestions and strategies.

I challenge you to consider how you might use this week's Friday Five Resources to design a classroom activity that introduces female role models to your students (both girls and boys). The images and stories of women in tech are beneficial to all students, and to society as a whole. The next generation of innovators will come from the curiosity and spirit of innovation we inspire in today's students. Helping girls see their future as women in tech will give birth to a more diverse wave of infinite thinkers. What can we as educators do to help?

• Perhaps you might display some of the photos on your school bulletin boards.
  
• Perhaps you might assign reading or writing assignments from the collection of stories featuring women in tech
  
• Perhaps you might brainstorm with your students ways to publish your own blog post for AdaLoveLace Day. If you don't have a place to post a blog, you can always post an entry in the comments of this section. Don't forget to tag it--AdaLovelaceDay09
  
• Perhaps you might introduce a lesson on using Technorati or the way "tags" can work to assimilate collective knowledge using the power of tagging.
  

So I challenge you to use the comments sections to share your ideas of how to use AdaLoveLace Day or to add to the collection of post that will be published. Looking forward to having you join me in fulfilling my #4 on my New Years Resolution post.

Friday Five - Sites with Role Models of Women in Technology

1. http://www.passionit.info/albums.php
   Probably the most impressive and global collection of role models were free albums from all 7 continents.



2. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/132/the-most-influential-women-in-technology.html
   The most influential women in technology according to Fast Comapny is broken up into the following categories
   

   Women in Tech: The Executives
   Women in Tech: The Entrepreneurs
   Women in Tech: The Gamers
   Women in Tech: The Evangelists
   Women in Tech: The Activists
   Women in Tech: The Bloggers
   Women in Tech: The Brainiacs
   
   

3. http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2008/11/influential-women-web.html
   Fast Company's 2008 picks as Most Influential Women in Web 2.0



4. http://www.pinkstinks.co.uk/role_models.php
   Although, this project appears to be a newcomer and has a smaller collection of role models in the technology area, it uses design elements with higher appeal to younger students.



5. http://www.sallyridescience.com/for_girls
   This collection of role models from the Sally Ride Science Web Site includes role models in several S.T.E.M. careers including
   -Contributions of 20th-Century Women to Physics Website:
   www.physics.ucla.edu/~cwp
   -Role Model Project for Girls sponsored by ACM's Committee on Women in Computing http://women.acm.org/
   -The Archives of Women in Science and Engineering Iowa State UniversityWebsite: www.lib.iastate.edu/spcl/wise/wise
   -Women of NASAWebsite: www.quest.arc.nasa.gov/women/intro.html

Horizon K12 Report

As part of their Emerging Technologies Initiative, the New Media Consortium annually publishes a document entitled the Horizon Report, which addresses new technologies and associated trends and challenges related to learning institutions. The production of this report is led by NMC staff with assistance from an advisory board. Recently, the NMC has branched into creating specialized reports such as this one addressing the implications of emerging technologies for education in Australia and New Zealand. Currently, work is underway on a K12 global edition of the Horizon Report.

Last week, I had the privilege and pleasure of attending the first advisory board meeting for this particular K12 venture in Dallas, Texas. Advisory board members hailed from around the world and work in various capacities for a variety of organizations. Some work for corporations and non-profits; others were employed by elementary, secondary, and higher education institutions. While much of the preliminary work for the K12 report is completed online through the use of a wiki, this face to face meeting facilitated a remarkable process for digging into the project. NMC documentation refers to this method as a modified Delphi process. (Incidentally, I was able to get a better grasp on the goals of the Horizon Report from this real time meeting, adding evidence to my personal belief that face to face interactions are not completely disappearing from the way we work).

In order to understand this qualitative research process, take a look at the 2009 Horizon Report recently released at ELI Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida. This is the end result of a very defined process that is used and adapted as needed for all Horizon Reports including the current K12 one. Through the use of a wiki, advisory members were given materials to read and reflect upon. Participants were also asked to bookmark potentially relevant web sites using a common tag, and links to this del.icio.us social bookmarking feed are also posted to the wiki. All of this is done virtually, including addressing a research agenda established by NMC leaders Larry Johnson, Alan Levine and Rachel Smith. The questions on this agenda were as follows

• What would you list among the established technologies that learning-focused institutions should all be using broadly today to support or enhance teaching, learning, or creative expression?

• What technologies that have a solid user base in consumer, entertainment, or other industries should learning-focused institutions be actively looking for ways to apply?

• What are the key emerging technologies you see developing to the point that learning-focused institutions should begin to take notice during the next 3 to 5 years? What organizations or companies are the leaders in these technologies?

• What do you see as the key challenges related to teaching, learning, or creative expression that learning-focused institutions will face during the next 5 years?

• What trends do you expect to have a significant impact on the ways in which learning-focused institutions approach our core missions of teaching, research, and service?

Advisory board members not present in  Dallas contributed their expertise on the wiki and at our Dallas meeting, members attending added to this collection of knowledge. We vetted trends and challenges, and finally established the emerging technologies that we believe schools should adopt immediately, those that they should be looking to adopt in the two to three year range, and those that worth keeping in mind in terms of long range planning. This process was seamless and resulted a group consensus on these various topics. In general, I felt that we kept to our agenda for the day and produced tangible results by the end of meeting. 

Underlying our work was the amazing graphic facilitation by NMC Vice President Rachel Smith. Rachel has a background in art education and she gave further meaning to our discussions by translating information into a graphical format. A large sheet of paper served as a whiteboard for illustrating our introductions and Rachel also transcribed trends, challenges, and technologies already logged in the wiki on to other sheets. These images really engaged us, helped refine our thinking, and will serve as an archive to which we can look back and reflect. This technique served to bridge the virtual work in the wiki (and advisory board members not present) with the face to face meeting agenda.

Graphic facilitation is a field that previously has been unknown to me and I thought it was a very powerful way of gathering information, guiding the decision making process and for reinforcing learning for participants. Rachel mentioned that these facilitators are not just used for meeting work, but also in conjunction with keynote speakers. For more information on graphic facilitation, check out the Center for Graphic Facilitation and the International Forum for Visual Practitioners website.

The work for the K12 Horizon report will continue over the next few weeks with further refinements to the short list of new and emerging technologies. NMC CEO Larry Johnson, CTO Alan Levine and Vice President Rachel Smith will also be engaged with the research and writing of the final report scheduled for release at the annual Consortium for School Networking conference March 10 -12 in Austin, Texas. Also, I will be a guest on the Seedlings podcast to talk about the work of the advisory board sometime in March. It is my hope that this practical document will serve as a catalyst for K12 educational institutions to examine their own practices related to technology and to plan for the future. Now is the time to get ahead of new technologies; we must align ourselves with changes in the way the world works and communicates.

For more information on the New Media Consortium, visit them at http://www.nmc.orge. See also information on the Horizon Project and check out their YouTube channel, their photos in Flickr, and their twitter channel!

NCTI Technology Innovators Conference

Recently Lucy Gray and I were invited to the 2007 NCTI Technology Innovators Conference. The focus of this conference is building solutions to make technology and information more accessible, especially for young people with disabilities. Check out this slideshow of the conference highlights!

An important part of this conference is connecting researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs and policy makers. It was inspiring to hear from innovators and social entrepreneurs like Jim Fruchterman from the nonprofit technology company, Benetech. Recently, Benetech was selected by the Office of Special Education Programs at the U.S. Department of Education to provide access for every student with a print disability in the United States via Bookshare.org. Lucy spoke on a panel with Jim and Chuck Hitchcock from CAST on NIMAS legislation, an significant law that guides the production and electronic distribution of digital versions of textbooks and other instructional materials so they can be more easily converted into accessible formats. Lucy's main question was: Why can't services like Bookshare be made available to allow all students access to digital textbooks?

In his recent ITM post Steve Hargadon encouraged the use of open source to create exciting collaborations and provide solutions. So, at the NCTI conference, it was exciting to meet developers who shared open source assistive technology initiatives that offer free tools. This included Steve Jacobs from the IDEAL Group. Steve shared about his colleague Charles Chen (a Google technologist) who developed Fire Vox.

Fire Vox is an open source, freely available talking browser extension for the Firefox web browser, essentially a screen reader designed especially for Firefox. In addition to the basic features, such as providing navigation assistance that are expected of screen readers, Fire Vox provides support for MathML and CSS speech module properties. Imagine how students would benefit to have dense text read aloud to them! Steve Jacobs and his colleagues (including Chen) have also repackaged Fire Vox so that it (and other open source applications) can run off of a standard, portable flash drive equipped with a fully-accessible talking menu. I spoke with Steve, and if you want to learn more about portable open source assistive technology, take a look at his NCTI presentation and/or contact him directly. (Talking about making applications accessible - check out the features of the new Google Toolbar (5) which supports applets used by assistive technologies like screen readers etc. and enables keyboard navigation and access. )

An underlying theme of the conference this year was ensuring that the “participatory culture” of social networking also includes young people with disabilities. For example, there was a session titled “Second Life for Students With Special Needs.” Topics during this session included how 3D environments such as Second Life can be made accessible for people with other disabilities such as low vision. Everett Harper, director of community initiatives at Linden Lab, also mentioned Brigadoon Island, an area in Second Life devoted to people with Asperger's syndrome (for more info on Second Life, check out a February 2007 ITM blog post, where I highlighted Amanda Baggs, an adult with autism who participates in Second Life.)

Conference face to face sharing was done via various theme events. One such event was the Innovations Marketplace which allowed innovators to share ideas with venture capitalists and grant makers gave presentations. At the Techology Expo an opportunity was provided for key leaders in assistive and learning technology to showcase their work. This year's Peer Awards for the Brightest Idea was given to SMART Brain Technology. Smart Brain Home System uses technology to improve the behaviors of individuals with autism, language disorders and attention deficits. The equipment is being tested through an NCTI grant with adolescents with ADD. The large picture posted here shows Domenic Greco of "Smart Brain Home System", with Julie Duffield of WestEd at the Technology Expo. Julie is pictured about to wear a visor with sensors attached to a Sony PlayStation. This device tracked her brain activity and gave neurofeedback on her attention levels while playing a racing game.

To keep important discussions like this going after the conference, the folks at NCTI have issued a brief titled “Using the Power of Social Media to Promote Assistive and Learning Technologies ” and invite all of us to give our input to this document. These issues and people at this conference provided much food for thought about diversity, access and innovation. View the NCTI conference sessions materials to learn more.

Also if you want to find out more information or resources related to this event please feel free to contact - Julie &/or Lucy.