K-12 Online Conference "Ways of Working"

K-12 Online conference
Ways of Working
By: Maria Knee
December 17, 2009

This particular conference was presented by Chris Betcher from Australia. During this conference Chris explains many different ways to take an ordinary learning experience and enhance it through the use of technology. He explains how to use the Internet to research different events which students may be learning about by using news trackers,blogs,twitter and flicker to receive updates. He also speaks about a useful tool that you can use to organize and track all the sites from one spot. He discusses sites you can use to upload photos to create digital sotires, and turn them into comics; as well as interactive art sites which you can use to inspire creativity and learning about particular subjects.

I found this web conference extremely useful and inspiring. This presenter was very excited about technology and the way he presented the information made me feel as though it was important and easy enough to incorporate into many lesson plans. One of the things I found most useful was the site he recommend to organize Internet information on. I always find it amazing all of the different resources we have on the web but so overwhelming at the same time. This website (http://www.netvibes.com),allows you to organize all of the different websites about a topic in one specific spot. You can make your own web newspaper about a specific event that is updated every time there is a new post about your topic. You can go to one spot and get all of the blog, news, flicker, and twitter feeds without going to each individual site. This information will make me much more likely to use the Internet to engage my students in following events electronically by helping me organize more and become less overwhelmed with all of the information. I think that this is a simple and fabulous resource to engage kids in current events. All of the presenters points were very simple and straight forward ways to incorporate technology into lessons. He also provides a long list of the valuable websites that he talks about so that you can easily access them after the conference. I would definitely recommend taking the 23 minutes to watch this video, you wont be disappointed.