Hintonblogger

I have been in my current position (Instructional Technologist) for a year now, and am very grateful to my school district (Gilbert Public Schools in Arizona) for the opportunity to attend NECC. The whole conference opened my eyes to a different paradigm of learning and to consider that the student perspective, with the advent of technology, might really have shifted effective educational techniques more than I had been willing to admit. The sessions I attended not only helped expose my to that paradigm, but also provided some potential short-term actions I could do to help begin meeting the challenge of educating today's students, who are truly digital natives.

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.

Here is my report I filed with eSchool News.  I haven't seen any of the two reports I've filed with them posted yet, but I'll keep you posted.  Here are my notes from the terrific morning workshop I attended.  It provided some great ideas and motivation for rolling out online professional development in our school district.  I even had the opportunity to begin setting up my own sample online professional development class in Blackboard. It is an excellent system.  I'm looking forward to the Moodle workshop that is starting right, so I better go...

One other quick thought from today's sessions.  The keynote tonight was by David Weinberger and he addressed "The New Shape of Knowledge." His most interesting concept was that knowledge today is in many ways conversation.  He set up the idea very well and is an engaging speaker.  While that concept may sound a bit relativistic, I don't think it necessarily dismisses that fact that there are absolutes out there.  The argument he made was that today, with the decentralized acquisition of information made possible by the Internet and global communication, the knowledge we gain is not made in isolation but by the ties and interaction that technology has thrust upon us.  Blogs, the Internet, global audio and video communication, wikis have made producers of knowledge out of those who were previously only consumers and that we are richer for it.  He compared wikipedia.com to the current Encyclopedia Brittanica and that fact that wikipedia.com has 600,000 articles on different topics, while the Encyclopedia has only 65,000 (and at 32 volumes the print version simply cannot get any bigger).  Because of this interconnectivity, we are seeing an expansion of knowledge as well as (in his opinion) the improvement of our knowledge.  Check out http://www.wikipedia.org and tell me if you think our knowledge is really expanding and improving (I'll be checking it out too)?

Here is my first report I sent to eSchool News as a volunteer correspondent.  You can follow the different sessions (as well as my reports on the ones I was assigned - I have at least one every day) throughout the week at http://www.eschoolnews.com/cic/. 

MF235 – Drive for 2005 – 100% Participation Workshop Report

Well it is about midnight here in Philadelphia on Monday, June 27th, 2005.  I'm excited for NECC to start today and am trying to put last minute plans together to start the day of successfully.

I'm looking forward to a number of sessions about Online Learning, including using Moodle as an open source alternative to Blackboard.  I hope to get a number of ideas on effectively blending traditional face-to-face learning with the online learning environment in Blackboard or Moodle.  There are many powerful advantages to blending face-to-face and virtual learning for both student learning and professional development for teachers, and yet it is an area that is fairly underdeveloped in K-12 education.

Now that school is out I should find myself with plenty of time to do anything I wanted, Right? There are simply too many cool things to do in the short time available. Does that sound familiar? Not that I'm complaining though, the summer has been great so far and I'm looking forward to all of the fun reunions and trips we have planned. It has also been great to spend a lot more time with my kids and wife. (My son and daughter are probably wondering why "Daddy" is around so much.)

In addition to NECC, I will be at the Rick Hinton reunion in San Diego, my brother Travis' wedding in the Salt Lake City temple, the Darris Ellis reunion at Bear Lake, ID, and the Lavar Hinton family in St. George/Hurricane, UT. All of that before the 4th of July, whew! (Oh and I'm trying to fit going up to Scout Camp for a couple of days with the Scout group I'm a Scoutmaster for!)