Hintonblogger

You hate to jinx yourself, but I have to say that today worked out great and I'm really grateful. I hit all three sessions I wanted to get to and each one of them was awesome in their own right. The three I attended were:

1. Enhancing Teacher Quality with Online Professional Development
2. Delivering Educational Tasks with Online Portals - MyBPS
3. Use your Noodle - Learn Moodle!

My brother would have liked the MyBPS presentation as they shared how they streamlined their workflow by developing a portal in .NET. I will be filing a report on the session with eSchool News and there will be more on that session in my report. These people are truly doing some amazing things with streamlining the educational workflow and exchange of ideas. Their site is closed to user login only, but the presentation showed some of the site interior and examples of the types of content it contained. The one thing I found amazing was that with all the work they went through and go through to have an incredibly usable portal internally, they mentioned they have no plan or requirement for their schools to have an external presence. My only guess for the "why" of that is because parents have access to MyBPS and the information that an external school website typically contains is in MyBPS.

Both the Enhancing Teacher Quality with Online Professional Development and the Moodle workshops were absolutely terrific. The big issues in technology and education are connectivity, education when you want it, free exchange of data and ideas, communication, and interactivity. It is those issues on which I believe technology in education must stake there claim. Those ideas are where the power of technology shines and really has no equal. Inspiration is a great product, I like it and would probably use it. However, there is always the part of me that says I could be drawing this on a piece of paper too. I know all the arguments for using Inspiration and I make those arguments too, but we must also be honest and admit there is a paper-based alternative that, while perhaps less feature rich and less exciting, can do that same job (without needing several hours to teach kids how to use the Inspiration program). The difference with the examples or issues I mentioned above is that technology allows us to do things in those areas that we simply cannot do nearly as well any way else. Technology offers us (both in education and in the "real" world) a huge advantage in those areas compared with alternatives. Perhaps one of the reasons technology has really not transformed education (perhaps it has transformed it, but it hasn't revolutionized it....yet) is because up until now we really haven't been able to apply it in the areas where it can have its truly revolutionary impact. Perhaps it was the technology we were waiting for, maybe the bandwidth, processor power, or cheap and excellent connectivity software wasn't available. I firmly believe it is now and that we can be truly transformational. If we will just jump on.....