NAEYC Conference

I am bursting with things to share from the National Association for the Education of Young Children Conference in Washington DC last week. I am most excited about the new technology finds from two excellent sessions I attended on bringing technology to children and teachers.
We are already using a blog in our classroom, but now I know about http://www.glogster.com, a place to combine pictures, audio and words. I plan on playing with it to figure out how to help my students make their own contributions.
Next, I learned about Bee-bots. These are little programmable robots that move 15cm for each programmed step. So, you can press forward, forward, left, forward and it will move 30 cm forward, 15 cm to the left and another 15 cm forward. By using mats that are blocked off in 15cm grids, you can program the bee-bot to follow a path. The kids are learning basic programming and robotics. You can also make the grids learning tools by putting, shapes, numbers, or anything else in the grids and challenge the kids to program the bee-bot to get to the right one.
There is also a Web 2.0 program called voicethread. This lets you post an image or video and comment on it. Then, others can come in and also add comments. There are multiple ways to input--you can comment by recording to your microphone, telephone, text, record on the voicethread site or use your webcam. This tool allows you to have a conversation about something with multiple inputs. I am just beginning to devise ways to use this tool. I am thinking of just putting up a "story starter" photo and having the kids comment on what they think the story could be.

I also learned about SimplyBox, which I have since found out is a lot like the application Delicious (which I have never used, but plan on investigating). With SimplyBox, you can visually organize  websites. I thought this might be a great way to organize places for kids to visit on the web. I could have a math box, an animals box, and a letters box. The kids would have a visual to navigate, instead of just words, which is all bookmarks have.
Then, there is Create-A-Graph. This place is amazing. You can survey your kids with a simple question, like "Do your shoes have laces, velcro, or slip on?" Then, when you have the answers, you can input the data and make a pie, bar, line, area, or XY graph. It is a great way to create a visual for the information you collect from your students.  There is some research that suggests kids should be exposed to visual charts and data early in order to better to understand it later.

When I plow through my notes and find the other sites, I will post again. I am going to include a link to Arnie Duncan, our US Secretary of Education, Dancing to Greg and Steve.
Enjoy!




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