KS Educational Technology Conference

This year’s Ed Tech Conference theme was Hana Pono “to work with purpose/passion.” The passion was definitely evident in some sessions I attended. These presenters remind us that we need to choose what we are passionate about and to take action on it. We all too often get inspired then return to our normal life as we let our inspirations fade away. Our passions don’t need to change the world they just need to change ourselves. Here are a couple presenters whose passions have brought positive change to themselves and others.

The Green Bronx Machine
The opening keynote speaker this year was Stephen Ritz a South Bronx teacher/administrator who gave a motivating, high energy and inspirational talk on the Green Bronx Machine. The Green Bronx Machine is an organization founded by Stephen and his students who focus on healthy eating, growing their own vegetables to reach academic success. The Green Bronx Machine is an inspirational story that started out as an after school program and now has evolved into an award winning K-12+ model that is fully integrated into core curriculum. In addition to academic success their students and the Bronx community also benefit through job creation, community beautification, increased health and fresh vegetables.

Save the Honu
Katelyn Hirata is a six year old Kindergarten student whose was inspired to save the Honu “Turtles” from reading a National Geographic article. Her presentation reflected the depth of her passions through her project-based experiences, presentations, fund raising efforts and visiting real turtles. I think the Ed Tech Conference should have more child presenters like Katelyn that demonstrate not only technology integration, but their passions as well.

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Schools of the Future: Acquiring and Representing Knowledge

This year's Schools of the Future conference was an information-rich event. When we think of the future, more than a few of us probably also think of technology. That association certainly carries over in the interpretation of the conference title Schools of the Future . Indeed, many topics besides educational technology were covered; however, the technological advances were a strong highlight at the conference in my view. As mentioned in one of Cassie's previous posts , there are online classes everywhere. The first few links on my list reference ways to learn on your own (i.e., ways to acquire knowledge). The second set of links refer to ways of representing knowledge. **Note: All icons link to the affiliated website. Academic Earth has hundreds of free online lectures from prominent university professors, including Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, The University of Houston, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Michigan State, Princeton, Rice, UCLA, UCSF, and the list

Geotagging

A "wouldn't it be nice" idea that's been around a while is the ability to tag a map with images that are linked to more information about the site. Kelly C suggested it as a way for students to share knowledge about a cultural/historic site or the geographic area they live in with classmates. (right, no addresses!) There are now cameras and even storage media that embed latitude and longitude into images as they are shot. But you don't need fancy new toys to do this. I tried Flickr's geotagging map and it's fun and supereasy. Want to try it? Log in to Flickr http://www.flickr.com Sign in as " techedine " password " wist101 " yea, corny. Click the " You " tab then the " Your Photostream > Map " or Organize > Your Map links. Click the Satellite link in the upper right. Cool view! (you may need Google Satellite downloaded). Images along the bottom of the screen with colored dots have already been droppe

Zoho Creator

I thought I’d share this web application I came across in my quest to find a relatively simple app to help us manage our mentoring data in the DL Orientation. Our specific needs were that it be a free online database, password protected, had the capability of rapid form development without too much programming knowledge and was easy for the end user to use. The application that met these requirements was Zoho Creator ( http://www.zohocreator.com/ ) a part of a suite of online applications including word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, wikis, organizers and more. What’s great about Zoho Creator is that they have an online repository of applications already developed that you can download to your account and use for free. Initially, I tried some of these applications, but it was overkill for our needs. Zoho Creator can do a lot if you know programming and they have a pay model where it allows you more flexibility and features. I think Zoho Creator would be a useful tool for both

Kamehameha Schools Distance Learning (KSDL) Owau

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