ISTE 2010 Explorers and Excellence Slide Show

The ISTE 2010 opening kick-off featured the following slides as people came in and filled the auditorium. The slides featured famous people who accomplished big things and quotes attributed to them. ISTE has made that loop of slides available through YouTube. Fortunately, in the video they spared us the music that accompanied the slides in the auditorium.


H/T to Jim Gates.

ISTE Unplugged Recordings Now Available

The recordings from ISTE Unplugged are now available on the ISTE Unplugged site. To access the recordings simply find the session in which you're interested and the recording link should be present at the end of the session description. Bear in mind that there were some technical glitches during the week so you might not be able to access everything you wanted to see. Thanks to Kim Caise and Steve Hargadon for all of their efforts to make ISTE Unplugged a successful event.

Applications for Education
ISTE Unplugged sessions covered everything from tips for elementary school technology integration to school-wide deployments of 1:1 initiatives to iPads to school leadership. In other words, ISTE Unplugged offered something for everyone in education. Take a look at the sessions and find one that interests you then share your new ideas with your local colleagues before school starts in the fall.

June's Ten Most Popular Posts

The month of June came to busy conclusion for me as I was at the ISTE 2010 conference. If you ever get a chance to go to ISTE's annual conference (it will be in Philadelphia next year) I highly recommend attending. Aside from the many excellent formal sessions, the conversations you can have with other forward-thinking educators are amazing. Anyway, that is my round-about way of saying that I forgot to post the month-in-review yesterday.

Here are the ten most popular posts of the last month:
1. Free PDF to Word Converter
2. Hundreds of Reviewed Online Mathematics Resources
3. 100 Ways to Use VoiceThread in Education
4. Tools for the 21st Century Teacher - Great eBook
5. Free eBook - 20 WEBTOOLS Applied to Teaching
6. Illustrated and Narrated Explanation of Creative Commons
7. Downloading Videos for Use In the Classroom
8. Google Earth Skills Quiz and Tutorials
9. Google Voice Opens to Everyone in the US
10. New Sharing and Editing Options in Google Docs

In June Free Technology for Teachers reached new statistical highs for subscribers in surpassing the 25,000 mark for the first time. Additionally, there are now nearly 5,000 fans of Free Technology for Teachers on Facebook. Thank you to everyone that has helped grow the reach of Free Technology for Teachers and welcome to all new subscribers and fans. Finally, if you're on Twitter please feel free to follow me at twitter.com/rmbyrne where I post not only resources from this blog, but also resources that others share as well as some personal updates about my classroom and occasionally my cats. I do try to follow all teachers back so if you follow me and you don't get a follow back, please send me an @ message to get on my radar.

Lots of Great Links from ISTE 2010

The ISTE 2010 conference just wrapped-up a couple of hours ago. I had a great time reconnecting with folks that I met last year, meeting new people, and learning lots of great stuff about technology and education. If you weren't able to attend, but want to discover some of the great websites that were shared throughout the conference, head on over to the ISTE 2010 Diigo group. Currently, there are 115 links on the list that were shared during the conference. I went through the list and found about one dozen sites that were new to me.

Applications for Education
Diigo is a great social bookmarking service for educators. Educators (or anyone else) can create private and or public groups for sharing the links they find with their colleagues. What's really nice about Diigo is that not only can you share links with your group, you can also comment on the links and explain why you bookmarked it and how it might be helpful to educators.

Here's a nice Diigo video tutorial created by Google Certified Teacher Lisa Thumann.


Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
Seven Tools for Organizing Web Research
Diigo Teacher Accounts
A Quick Guide to Annotating Using Diigo

Talking Blogging With Sue Waters from Edublogs

Tomorrow at 12:30pm (Mountain Time) Sue Waters from Edublogs and I will be hosting an ISTE Unplugged session. The topic of the session is best practices for blogging. We intend the session to be primarily a question and answer session. The session will be streamed live via Elluminate. (Click here and scroll to the bottom to find the Elluminate link tomorrow, the Elluminate link isn't live yet). It does not cost anything to attend online. If you're here at ISTE 2010 please come on down and join us.

If you have questions for Sue and I about blogging, please join us in the Elluminate session. If you like, you can submit your questions ahead of time through the Google form embedded below.

Update: We already have questions coming in. So far the questions are mainly about student blogging, which is great. I just want to clarify that we're also more than willing to answer questions about general blogging issues such as comment moderation, post length, finding your voice, etc.

A Win a Trip to ISTE 2010 Courtesy of netTrekker

If you've been considering going to ISTE 2010, but if money is tight and your school can't afford to send you, netTrekker has an opportunity you might want to investigate. netTrekker is hosting a video contest that will award $1500 ISTE 2010 scholarships to two winners. The contest asks teachers to create a short, 3-7 minutes, video demonstrating how they use netTrekker (and related resources) to deliver personalized learning experiences to students. If you don't have a netTrekker account, you can get a 30 day free subscription in order to enter the video contest. You can read all of the contest rules and requirements here.

For the record, I do not have any affiliation with netTrekker. I'm just passing along what I think is a good opportunity for someone to attend a great education conference.

What is ISTE?

My name is Beth Still and I am so happy that Richard invited me to be a guest blogger while he is enjoying his vacation. I "met" Richard on Twitter about a year and a half ago. He was kind enough to be my test subject in a crazy experiment I had last year to use my PLN (personal learning network) to send a "newbie" to ISTE which is a national educational technology conference. The response was so overwhelmingly positive that I decided to do it again this year. This year, Jason Schrage, a teacher from New York is the ISTE10 Newbie.

The International Society for Technology in Education is the premier membership organization for helping promote professional development, innovation, and advancing the effective use of technology. More than 100,000 educators from around the globe are members. Membership ranges anywhere from $39-$212 depending on the benefits. Some of the benefits of membership include:

• “Leading and Learning with Technology” magazine
• Membership in any or all of the special interest groups (SIGS)
• 30% discount on ISTE books
• Discounted rates for professional development webinars and annual conference
• Social Networking opportunities

The ISTE website has links to more information about advocacy, educator resources, careers, publications, professional development, and national technology standards. Some of this information is available to the general public while other areas are reserved for members only. There are also seventy-six ISTE affiliates from five countries.

As summer draws near you will start hearing people talk about the ISTE conference (formerly NECC-National Educational Computing Conference) which will be in Denver during the last week of June. During this conference thousands of educators converge on the host city to discuss anything and everything related to educational technology. (Click here to learn more about NECC 2009. ) This is a fantastic opportunity to learn, share, and meet some amazing people.

If you are planning on attending ISTE you might want to consider attending Edubloggercon on June 26. It is an all day event in which people discuss various educational issues. I missed Edubloggercon 2008 in San Antonio because I did not know about it, but I was able to attend last year in Washington DC. It is definitely worth spending an extra couple of nights away from home.

Support ISTE Newbie 2010 by Buying a Book

Last year because of the efforts of many of you, Beth Still, and VoiceThread I was able to attend the NECC/ ISTE conference for the first time. It was an awesome learning experience that I would have missed out on if Beth Still had not organized the fundraising effort. One of her co-conspirators (and I mean that in the nicest way) in organizing the effort was Jason Shrage who is a social studies teacher in New York. Jason has never been to ISTE/ NECC and, like me, his district can't or won't foot the bill. Therefore, Beth organized ISTE Newbie 2010 to send Jason to the ISTE conference in Denver. The fundraising has gone well so far the goal is in sight, but they could use a little more help in getting there. This is where you and I come in.

From now through Sunday night I'll donate any and all comissions generated through my Amazon Affiliate account. I'll also match all book revenues. I typically receive 6% of revenue generated through the Amazon links or widgets that I use. For example if someone buys a $20 book, I earn $1.20. This applies to everything sold through the Amazon widgets and links. So if you were thinking of buying a new book, DVD, netbook, or anything else Amazon sells and you would like to help out the ISTE 2010 Newbie this weekend is a great time to do it. Buy something for yourself, like Larry Ferlazzo'sBuilding Parent Engagement in Schools,and help out a good cause at the same time. (Just make sure you click one of the links or widgets here first).

Here are some more places to read out the ISTE 2010 Newbie.
Jeff Utecht's The Thinking Stick
Beth Still's blog

Vote Now for the 2010 ISTE Keynote Speaker

The final round of voting for the 2010 ISTE keynote speaker is now underway. The finalists are:
Gary Stager, Peter H. Reynolds, Jeff Piontek, Alan November, and Chris Lehmann. You can learn more about each of these men and vote for your choice on the ISTE 2010 keynote page. Scott McLeod kept running totals of the preliminary rounds of voting which you can find on his blog.

Ignite ISTE

I wish that I could claim credit for the idea I'm about to share, but it was really Beth Still who put the idea in my head via an exchange of Twitter messages and asked me to blog about it. ISTE is currently holding a vote to select the keynote speaker for ISTE 2010. The candidates come from a variety of backgrounds including President of the United States, co-founder of Apple, NY Times columnist, and high school principal. The diversity of candidates has lead to some debate as to whether or not the next keynote speaker should come from a background as an educator. There has also been debate in the blog-o-sphere as to the topic that the chosen speaker should address.

The diversity of topics and diversity of candidates for the ISTE 2010 keynote prompted Beth to say that it's too bad we can't have more viewpoints represented. One great way to have more ideas represented would be to host an Ignite series at the ISTE conference. Unfortunately, it's probably too late to make it happen this year, but it is a great idea for 2011.

For those not familiar with Ignite, Ignite is a series of presentations organized and hosted around the country. Speakers at Ignite conferences are given five minutes and twenty slides to share their best ideas. The slides automatically advance after fifteen seconds. One of the best Ignite presentations I've seen was given by Chris Lehmann. I've embedded the video of that presentation below.


By the way, Chris Lehmann is currently the leading vote getter for the ISTE 2010 keynote.

Interview With Beth Still About ISTE Newbie 2010

As many of you know, last year I was fortunate enough to attend NECC 2009 through the donations of many of you, VoiceThread, and the hard work of Beth Still. You can read about last year's project and my experiences here, here, and here. Last year, the fund-raising began in April. The fund-raising for the 2010 ISTE Newbie Project has begun already. In the video below Beth and I talk about the ISTE 2010 Newbie Project, the purpose, and the fundraising.

Free online screencasting tool

These are the links mentioned in the video:
Beth Still - Nebraska Change Agent
Jason Shrage - Oswego 98

ISTE 2010 Keynote Suggestions Wanted

Last year, thanks to the generosity of many of you and the hard work of Beth Still, I was able to attend NECC/ ISTE 09. Malcolm Gladwell was the keynote speaker for the conference. For 2010, ISTE is crowd-sourcing the selection of the conference keynote speaker. There is a three phase process being used to select the keynote topic and keynote speaker. Phase one is currently underway. In phase one you can suggest topics and vote on the suggestions. Click here to suggest topics and vote.