Hi again from the Laptop Institute. I am currently in the final session for the conference, and will be moving on to the TETA Summer Institute. My Monkey Jam animation session yesterday went down pretty well, but we had some real hardware issues with the delegate’s digital camera. A kindly soul drove me around for an hour this afternoon looking for cheap webcams, but none of the stores I went to lived up to their website catalogue, so I came back empty handed. Not sure what I will do to fix this at TETA….will have to play with the software tomorrow and try and work out the problem. On the plus side, my Open Source Software session went incredibly well, with great feedback, so I am happy about that.

Here are some brief notes from the last session. It was a great session, but very similar to my Powerful Internet session as far as introducing cool online tools, almost all of which I already use. So, a bit of a bust for me, but that’s no reflection on the presenter.

Getting Down and Dirty: Practical and Realistic Tech Integration

Josh Clark

The entire presentation with links etc is on Josh’s Tumblr site.

Online assessment for students – tip. Email student work back with comments but no grade, and get them to read the comments and email back a grade based on your comments. Ensures they read comments.

Some good resources outlined here, but I like to avoid any purchased software (ie Markin) and other areas covered, like Delicious, are things we are using already. I was hoping to find some great new tools and ideas, but its nice to get further reassurance that we are up to date with these things. I haven’t used Tumblr before, so I will have to have a look at that.

Portaportal – comment from the audience. Apparently it’s a nice secure social bookmarking site – so that students can’t access anyone else’s list of bookmarks except yours, as its all password protected.

I am going to have to go back and look into pbwiki a bit more. When Rachael and I signed up a couple of weeks ago, I thought all the plugins only came with the subscription, not the free version. Apparently that’s not the case now…which makes it a much more powerful tool. Now it has yackpack walkie talkie, slide show generation etc with the free wikisites.

David Warlick – last years keynote speaker, has created a blog site for teachers. Class Blogmeister . If you prefer student blogs to be totally restricted from public view, this is an option. This raises questions with me about the benefits of a public audience, and is it any different than just posting it within the school? We know students respond to a real world audience….as long as private details are not available, and public comments are moderated by the teacher before posting, then I prefer a public blog. I get the impression you can choose to have various levels of security with this site, which is good.