My morning at the Technology Conference

This past Saturday morning I attended the Technology Conference at Erickson Hall. From it, I took a lot of good ideas and resources involving technology that I can hopefully use during my internship year and in my future classroom. The first hour was a general introduction about different ways that you can use free technology resources in your classroom. It covered a lot of the information that we have been covering in CEP416 including Blogger, Wiki and del.icio.us. It made me very thankful that I am actually taking the CEP416 course this semester because it was very hard to get the full affect of the resources just through the presentation in that short amount of time.
The first session I attended was called "Using Technology to Promote Authentic Learning." To be honest, I didn't get much out of this presentation until the very end. The point that the presenter was trying to make through the activity that he was having us do was that you can do that activity or other activities with your own class and take pictures of them as you go. Then you can upload the pictures into a presentation and study them, looking at what each student is doing and how they are engaged in the activity. From studying these pictures, the teacher can then decide how they can change their strategies to fit the engagement levels of the different students, and how they can promote the best learning possible for each student as an individual. Basically, he was telling us how the teacher can use this particular technology to improve their teaching.
The second session that I attended was very informative. It had to do with integrating technology into language arts and social studies. The different sources of technology that were presented were podcasts, Google maps, classroom wikis, digital stories, and different types of literacy software. I especially enjoyed the ideas of the podcasts and the digital stories. Using these resources, students could actually create a version of a historical event or story that is their own while also showcasing their creative and imaginative abilities. By doing this, I believe that the students would better absorb the information and be able to retrieve it more effectively in the future by thinking back to this activity.
For the most part I enjoyed the technology conference, and I am very glad that I attended it because I got some great resources and ideas that I can hopefully integrate into my future classroom. It also made me even more happy that I am in CEP416 and that I have a whole semester to experiment and learn about some of these different technologies more in depth.