I had my first opportunity to share this year at the 2009 Illinois Education and Technology Conference. My presentation was titled, “Creating a Digital Substitute”.  The presentation was basically about using tools such as Flip Video cameras, MP3 Recorders, myplick.com, Microsoft  MovieMaker, Audacity and a variety of other tools. These tools allow a teacher to leave materials for a substitute teacher to utilize during a planned absence or  a staffing. Other opportunities could be a digital field trip, notes for an absent student or review for science lab setup and notes from class.

The idea of creating a digital substitute is a ultimately a way for the teacher to learn the technologies that eventually they will feel comfortable in sharing these technologies with their students. Two speakers (Charlene Chausis and David Jakes) at the 2007 conference shared that we need to immerse ourselves in these tools/technologies  in order for us to have a comfort level that we can then share these tools with others (students).

I will be attending the ICE Conference at the end of this month, February 24-27, 2009. I know there will be teachers and administrators at the conference since ICE stands for Illinois Computing Educators. This is an aspect of the conference(s) that I anticipate. It is the networking with other Teachers, Technology Coordinators, Directors, CIOs, and Administrators.

This will be the second conference that I have attended this year. The first being a conference in Springfield in November called the Illinois Education and Technology Conference.

At these conference(s), I get an increased passion for expanding the utilization of technology in our classrooms as well as ideas for better utilization for the professional and administrative technologies. Mostly because of the successes that are shared during the sessions.

A goal that I have for the upcoming conference is to learn from other schools how they are utilizing their budgets, big or small. As the time comes around this year for building budgets, I wonder about balancing the Capital Outlay, Supplies and Materials and the Professional Development that comes with the technologies.

I will check back in with an update at the beginning of March. In the meantime, please share conferences (technology and non-technology) you attend and one thing that you liked best about the conference.

Keep Learning and Sharing,
chris