holiday thoughts + share, ideas, and links….submissions from our members

…as we all start realizing a break is ahead for many of us, and yes maybe some downtime……during the winter holiday season… we have a few great resources, links, an important reminder about the new facebook privacy settings,  and some questions about laptops from members in this blog. Scroll down and enjoy these great resources and maybe share some of your own perspectives on laptops and multitasking with  George.

Wishing you all a restful, and relaxing holiday season!

Peace
John@ISPrague

The K12 Online Conference is LIVE now!  In its fourth year, this online conference provides presentations and collaboration opportunities with  many excellent educators and education technology leaders speaking on many issues and ideas for moving education ahead and creating more engaging environments for our learners. Beginning with Kim Cofino’s pre-conference Keynote, this year’s conference proves to be as inspiring and thought-provoking as in past years. All presentations are divided into 3 categories, Getting Started, Leading the Change, and Kicking It Up a Notch. There are live and archived events to view and share with others. This is a great opportunity to connect with other educators around the world and build your Personal Learning Network.

In the words of Wes Fryer: This is a FREE conference open to ANYONE by educators for educators around the world interested in integrating emerging technologies into classroom practice. A goal of the conference (among several) is to help educators make sense of and meet the needs of a continually changing learning landscape. Please see the “For Participants: Getting Started” page on our conference wiki to get started with the K-12 Online Conference.

Conference schedule with links to workshops  http://wiki.k12onlineconference.org/home/for-participants/2009-schedule

Conference Ning is the conference conversation hub  http://k12online.ning.com/

Conference wiki will help you get started http://wiki.k12onlineconference.org/

Conference blog features announcements and news http://k12onlineconference.org/

Archive Page linking to all presentations from previous years http://wiki.k12onlineconference.org/home/for-participants/archived-events

All the best,

Nancy@Madrid

Laptops

Interested in laptop use in classrooms and positive/negative effects on learning. Recently attended the Learning & the Brain Society’s conference (“Modern Brains: enhancing memory and performance in this distracting digital age”). One strong message from the conference was about the myth of multitasking, producing breadth but no depth. Torkel Klingberg’s presentation on “Working Memory – the overflowing brain” demonstrated that you pay for not performing at 100% on a tasks when multitasking. There is a capacity restraint. In dual-tasking studies, he showed that you could work at 100% on one or the other, but not on both. What is happening in multitasking is that attention is shifting rapidly from one task to the other and, importantly, some areas of the brain are required to be used for BOTH areas, providing a capacity restraint. So there are bottlenecks. What implications does this have to the use of laptops in classrooms? (or indeed in meetings?!) If student is note-taking as teacher talks, two tasks but perhaps one can learn to type without requiring anything but an automatic skill. But add to that surreptitiously Facebooking (one further task) and also keeping an eye on the teacher coming around the class (another task with strong emotional consequences and hence taking up brain resources), then multitasking with learning costs is surely to be the outcome. If you are interested, have posted further on http://edtech-insights.blogspot.com regarding multitasking. But what do 1to1 laptop schools say about this? What measures are taken to ensure attention? Is it the same for tablet 1to1 schools?

George

Top Disaster

This simulation has been a useful addition to a science unit “The Changing Earth” It helps make the connection with climate change.
http://www.stopdisastersgame.org/en/home.html
Flick the Switch
At The American School of Barcelona, the High School Student Council is using this European initiative to promote saving energy:

http://flicktheswitch.eu/
The site is fairly student friendly – I personally like the poster competition, this makes a good connection with part of a 4^th grade unit I teach on Magnetism and Energy.

Rosalind@barcelona