Saturday's NJEA / Stockton Technology Conference began in Alton Auditorium after coffee with Darryl Ensminger, Dr. Jung Lee, and the CCTS contingent: Dennis, Judi, Frank, and Mike Ritzius.

Mike was a Google presenter in the break-out sessions, which began right after keynote speaker Patrick Higgins explained how technology isn't an add-on in our daily lives, it just is. Classroom practice using technology is no longer on the horizon; it's here. And it's liberating. "Let's stop talking about technology integration; let's talk about learning!"

As an aside, Patrick's blog Chalkdust 101 had a fascinating post about Professional Development that comes to the learner. Two technology specialists "offer sessions live online using Skype and a screen-sharing program called Yugma (both free) to teach you about various social software applications and the possibilities for their use in the classroom." I'm wondering how that same kind of collaboration and learning might work if the topics were more about instructional design, pre-assessing, chunking the learning, assessing, pacing, and face-to-face class management. Hmmm? Could that be a capstone project?

Judi and I headed over to an Introduction to Thinkfinity. I'm glad we picked that one. I walked away with three resources I'm using this week with my Honors Freshmen. Thinkfinity is a website that offers thousands of K-12 lesson plans, inter-actives, and more. There are strategies for integrating Web-based resources into classroom learning, links to discipline-specific Websites that focus on science, humanities, history, math language arts, financial literacy and more.

Theresa Gibbon was our presenter and she was great! She welcomed us to the Thinkfinity Community which is another online collaboration group. Thinkfinity's community hosts are also available online for questions.

My freshmen honors are still working on their persuasive essays on the question "Does technology make us more human(e)?" This week they're building a survey in Google Docs to find out what their classmates, teachers, and administrators think. I'm also teaching them about surveys, random sampling, and so on. We'll watch a video on multitasking from MIT that I discovered on Thinkfinity. We may even take a peek at Digital Nation a little later.

Saturday, May 1, 2010 was a full but satisfying day, with the last session ending about 4 pm and lots to think about on the way home.