Tuesday at NECC (and the day ain’t over yet)

5:04 PM

[Warning: This is a conference session blog, so please forgive grammar and punctuation mistakes.]

I was lucky enough to be invited to the Intel Breakfast this morning and got to finally listen to Mike Hall, of the Georgia State Department of Education. It seems like Georgia is doing some interesting and bold things, which doesn’t surprise me with Hall at the helm.

The talk was very good, with much that I knew, much that I didn’t, and lots of new perspective.

I also attended a session done by Susi Munshi and Susan Switzer about Chicago Public Schools’ use of blogging. The presentation was good, though a bit basic for me. I’m sure that most of the audience was thrilled. I must say that I’d thought that they were going to go through the process of setting up a blog, but I probably misread the the description. They shared enough that was new to me to make the hour very well worth it.

One idea that really stuck was related to book reviews. We’ve all thought of having students write book reviews on the books that they read and then having them available for future readers. But they suggested asking students to journal as they read the book, pretending to be one of the characters. As they say, “How cool is that”.

I spent about the next two hours in the vendor’s section, podcasting most of the time, so that information will be available on my podcast page (http://connectlearning.davidwarlick.com/) very soon.