Exhibit Floor at NECC
The NECC Conference
NECC (National Educational Computing Conference) is an annual conference held by the International Society for Technology Education (ISTE). You can learn more about who they are at their site, but here’s some quick boiler plate information.
ISTE is the premier membership association for educators and education leaders engaged in improving teaching and learning by advancing the effective use of technology in PK-12 and higher education.
The conference this year was held in Washington, D.C. I have attended three times before (each time as a workshop presenter). Those conferences were in Chicago, Seattle and San Antonio. Next year’s conference is in Denver, CO. It will be a great opportunity for folks around here to attend.
Why do I attend?
This conference is admittedly not aimed at web developers, even K-12 ones. This is about solutions, not frameworks. My job however is often to provide solutions and as commercial solutions become more powerful that may become less and less about building things and more about adding LPS value to acquired solutions.
One very small project this week is a perfect example of something where attending NECC helps me. I need to do some LPS customization work to our Moodle installation before a training that happens on the 10th. There are a lot of questions one has to ask before starting something like this. What is Moodle? What is a Learning Management System? What are you going to be trying to do with this? What may you be trying to do with this down the road? What are others doing with Moodle? Seeing masses of folks fired up about these solutions and discussing what they are doing and have plans to do not only fires me up, but helps me get my head around the project and move forward in a meaningful way.
This is the sort of scenerio that plays itself out weekly, if not daily in the work that I do and I can see it in my work when I have spent too much time focusing on the technology/programming/designing aspect of things and not on the educational end-uses of it. NECC is a great time to put things in perspective.
So what about this year’s conference?
Washington was a very appropriate place for the conference. This is a convergence of people trying to change the educational landscape and there is no better place to realize that than Washington.
I spent most of my time on the show’s exhibition floor. This is the place where the vendors pitch their products in elaborate booths with one or multiple ‘theatres’. Having not attended in a few years, there were a few things that surprised me overall:
- The ubiquity of short-throw projectors. I noticed this from the minute that I walked in to register. Almost completely gone were projectors that you setup 10–20′ out from the screen. In their place were projectors that no more than a foot or two from the screen, projecting from above the screen. This nearly eliminated shadows caused by the person standing in front of the projector and I assume provided more true screen brightness/lumens.
- Products were very polished. You used to see a lot more things on the floor that looked like they were spawn from somebody’s weekend project. There were few booths like that this year. It also means that all of these solutions are looking to get a lot more money from you than they used to.
- The top-level sponsors are typically expected names like Microsoft and Adobe. This year they were Promethean and Smart (Interactive Whiteboard Makers).
Some conference notes
I did attend a few sessions and made some notes while I visited vendors. Here’s a bit of a dump from them.
- You can view my bookmarks from the conference here. I will be cleaning them up and annotating them better. As I walked the floor and went to sessions, I was just bookmarking things on the fly with my phone.
- Distance Learning is less-and-less about video and more about Learning Management Systems (like the previously-mentioned Moodle). I went to a session (kind of by accident) about Virtual Virginia. Virginia Virtual Advanced Placement School (VVAPS) offers online AP and foreign language courses to students across the commonwealth and nation [from their web site]. The most interesting thing to me about this session was to hear the process by which courses come together. They create teams of 3 content creators, 1 instructional designer and 1 project lead. These five people begin the process of building a course around September or October with plans to have it finished by June. Virtual Virginia maintains a collection of proven and implementable games and other tools that content creators can utilize to deliver their instruction. Courses undergo a very rigorous review process before being made available for the following school year.
- Web applications replacing desktop applications is becoming reality. I attended a session entitled Powerful Possibilities for Pint-Sized Students: Web 2.0 for the K-5 Environment presented by Regina Allen and Kim Stringer of Mississippi’s Columbia School District. Many of the links from my first point above came from here as they were just rapid-firing them, but there were some real gems in here. Some particularly fun ones were Pixton (make comic strips), Voki (make speaking avatars), Scrapblog (photos/memories in a blog format), Diigo (highlighter/note-sharing) and Bubbl.us Beta (brainstorming, idea mapping).
- Google Apps for Education provides a better LDAP integration tool than they did last time I was looking in to this… will check it out.
- Jing and screencast.com from TechSmith are a fantastic combination, and free!
- I spoke with salesfolks at SchoolCenter and eChalk about their K-12 content/site management applications. Neither provide anything that would be worth getting into a deep contract for, but it was interesting to see where each was going. eChalk, like some others at the show, was really pushing the social aspects of their software. I always scoff at this when I first hear it, but you can’t deny the power of a good social environment like Facebook. I don’t know if that is what we want/need, but I’m sure that things will move that direction. SchoolCenter was much more rigid and oriented towards a successful site. They provide a template that is pretty much all ready to go. All you need to do is work with them to fill it with your content. The provide solutions for teachers, schools and districts.
- The best interactive whiteboard hardware? Samsung was pitching one that was really just a LARGE LCD monitor with I assume a touch screen on it. It was beautiful.
- Netbooks were everywhere. In particular, I saw a lot of Intel Classmates.
- While most attendees seemed to carry Apple, most vendors were using Windows. I think as more and more things become browser-based, Windows and netbooks are really going to have the advantage until Apple can get focused on a Safari computer.
- There really needs to be a better and more standard way for folks to bookmark information from vendors, sessions with mobile devices to then print or otherwise read the information when they get home. The amount of junk at this conference was off the charts.
- I would really really like to get a weather station set up here (or somewhere). It would provide our site with live weather data and provide oodles of local data to our students. Need to talk to ksmith about this.
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