this icon represents a student-possible activity.
Firstly I will go over some websites that were shared. If for no one else at least I will have a record of how these may be of use in our classes.
The overall theme was connections. A lot of what presented was on having kids reflect publically and in China we have to find other ways than twitter/facebook/
GoogleDocs/YouTube and so much more to reflect publically. But then again has China done us a favour where we have to not constantly publish our lives?
VPNs are sometimes an answer but they can be blocked too. At the end of the day the best way to do it all is to do it on the intranet.
Students do not always need to be globally public except for collaborations with other schools. Often it is just an extension of the teacher's ego to demonstrate that they are part of the flat earth and they are getting mentioned in all the hundreds of teacher's blogs and tweets and some even go as far as to add awards they have collected from various educational websites. It all becomes a bit of a wank after awhile. Tell a teacher it will be all on the intranet and not on the web and they will dissolve into piles of binary code on the cold virtual floor. Neuage in binary is 01001110 01100101 01110101 01100001 01100111 01100101that is all I will divulge. Note: students born during the past couple of decades are considered technology-natives. I disagree with this as they came after this all started; my first webpage was in 1992 show me a 12-year old who has been making webpages for 19 years. I was on computers in the 1980s, late 1970s actually; again show me a 30+ teenager. They are not natives they have washed upon the shore, they are second-generation computer users. Let us stop putting teenagers and five-year olds on a pedestal and taking away our own creativity and insights. We share teaching, but we still are the leaders. Yes children know how to look up a webpage, Skype, e-mail, Tweet, Facebook - wow so can my 84-year-old parent-in-laws. I had a son who was writing code on our Commodore 64 in 1990 when he was 7 so a ball would bounce and the computer would say hello and he was making full webpages, keeping track of his baseball cards in 1992 when he was nine without using Dreamweaver or any out of the package products because he had learnt html.
Integration is not about putting a select group of humans on a throne and saying wow! look my five-year-old can use a flipcamera. Show me a student who is writing proper assignments and who knows at least basic coding, some Java, at least html, who can communicate with actual speech and who can still run around outside and play, then there is a student who is ready to grow in this world. We are being hijacked by corporations to purchase gadgets until the world is bankrupted both economically and morally. No one want a year old anything - schools can not buy basics such as art supplies because of having to keep up. Go figure. I love technology and have been using every new thing I could get a hold of for the past four decades. I have thousands of webpages and if I could I would never sleep - maybe in the future in a kurzweil-singularity-cyber-body I will never have to sleep. But let us keep track of the moment and the child needing us to model, not just show our thousands of tweets and contacts to move forward.
Issuu A useful site to find an online magazine on any topic. Of course these are popular magazines and not the peer-reviewed papers a student should be using to get information from a school library but it does fill in some gaps.
Flubaroo (need VPN for it to work) part of google apps have Google apps registered in the States not part of the education account because the school’s google account is not registered in the states. It is free once it is past China's Firewall. Tweeting was all the rage @ this conference. As if someone did not have their tweeter account set up or a thousand buddies with like interests then it was impossible to go another step without getting on the pony and having a bit of a tweet to feel important over. I do not see this as important in the classroom, much of what I said when I wrote my 150,000 word PhD thesis on Conversational Analysis of Chatroom "Talk"' a decade ago is reflected into this ramble. There is little difference in the communications of tweeting and a crowded chatroom of the 1990s. One of the differences though, and not for the good, is all the links that are embedded, as if trying to keep up with the stream was not enough, folks expect us to go to their blogs and sites and You Tube videos along the way. Hey turn off the faucet mate. I too got on that bandwagon - linked with some one-hundred people mainly from the conference, it is impossible to keep up. What is really annoying is the re-tweets - where people just click the tweet button on every story they read. I had to boot one dude who took up four pages; all re-tweets, he would not have had enough time to even have read ten-percent of his tweets. There is some ego thing about how many tweets one has I think. And then there are those who treat it like Facebook: 'having pizza', 'need to entertain the children', 'broke my fingernail', 'think I will sit down', 'wonder if I can buy some crack on EBay'.... Most of the people from the conference are tweeting over and over that it was a wonderful event, that they are at the airport, that they are now home - that the part they shared with us at the conference about their children has more to it... blimey it is all too much.
but do not despair - we have lots of new tools for this madness...
Pecha Kucha (Japanese: ペチャクチャ, IPA: [pet͡ɕa ku͍̥t͡ɕa],[1] chit-chat) s a presentation methodology in which 20 slides are shown for 20 seconds each, usually seen in a multiple-speaker event called a Pecha Kucha Night (PKN). This will be good for student prenetations. Pechaflickr = the sound of flickring is a good start, from CogDog - one of the top people to link to in Twitter for ideas. Bookmark his blog CogDogBlog Alan Levine's space for barking about and playing with technology50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story,
from CogDog
~ I will try this on one of my computer classes and suggest it to several teachers.
Compfight is an image search engine tailored to efficiently locate images for blogs, comps, inspiration, and research. They make good use of the flickr™ API, but aren't affiliated with flickr. Along with that is shutterstock that claims to have 16,168,604 royalty-free stock photos, illustrations, and vectors as of five minutes ago. I am not sure why we need so many photos ~ my students are given a camera and requested to take and manipulate their own photo for any project we are doing; if they can not take the photo then they can draw it - come on educators let the students be creative and do not give them everything.
Collecting all those things on the Internet can be painful I have been using diigo for a bit ~ my sometimes used site ~ This could be a useful way for students to keep track of things
There is a continuation of this use of tech at http://neuage.us/edu/levels.pdf
Put icons on pages for each student to navigate to their site and to their teacher's sites. This is a good idea as we tend to have so many places to go to and not only just the site but the student's site on that site. For example, these are some of my sites that I often work with - many more I have not had the time to put links to after all I too have a family and work and a life of travel and writing and filming but I am not going to go on about how web savvy my sons are that is not the issue the work here is to integrate technology in our classroom not to tell everyone how much our children have integrated it into our family.
Create a bundle in google drag an drop all the students into a bundle go to tweetdesk
IntenseDebate OK so this was not spoken of during the conference that I could find but there were a least a half-million suites/services/sites not mentioned. It was a very narrow-minded, 'lets tweet and the world will be integrated type of conference'. 
what more can I say except that even less people are following me.
Talkgadget.google was said to be better than Skype - will try it but if it is like other Google products in China maybe not.
a lot of folks used tumblr such as learning2connect.tumblr.com to build instant messages for all to see.In the group I was in we were to write something about integration of technology without thinking much about it and I wrote:
They showed other people's contribution but mine was passed by - go figure......
So what did I bring back to Dalian American International School? There are some things I would like to try though anything to do with tweeting I will give it a miss - that was most of the conference. I attended an inDesign gathering and I will be able to make good use of what we did in that for our upcoming school magazine that my class is doing. I met the ICT Coordinator from a school in Jakarta that I will set up a collaborative event with and of course my most useful knowledge came from the middle school principal from the American International School of Guangzhou; whom I met in a taxi on the way to the airport, regarding their laptop program. What this says is get offline and be aware of those around us who may give us the answer we are seeking. I learned this when I was a brother in a metaphysical Order back in the 1960s and 1970s and when I lived in those hippie communes in California and it is still useful info today.
Go again? yes of course these gatherings are useful to link with others for sure and next year it will be in Beijing and I am sure we will be that much more advanced. Hopefully presenters will not be so fixated on how tech savvy their children are and can get on with integrating technology into the class.
In the meantime we will develop webTV and our school online zine and I will re-read my PhD thesis 'Conversational Analysis of Chat Room "Talk"' as it is still relevant.
