Thing 13 – A 21st Century Conference

I attended 2 conferences and found them both to be very informative – and great reinforcement for what we have learned about so far.  The first was entitled “Never Too Young” and discussed 3 21st century tools that could be used with even the of youngest students.  The instructor,  Sharon Betts looked at Voicethread, Dipity and Blogging (using the blog site 21 Classes).  Students love to hear themselves speak – and since it does not require reading, typing or writing skills I can see how Voicethread would be a great tool to use with kindergarten and first grade – for example by taking students illustrations and having them add words.  Sharon reviewed how to sign-up and use Voicethread – and gave a breakdown of the pricing – it is free for some limited use, but for use by individual students under one group name pricing starts at $10.00 a year.  Dipity is a timeline tool – but looks like a really good one – it makes it easy to link to video and also to locations on the timeline – using Google map.  We have been introduced to Edublogs – but 21classes looks like another good (and free) blog site to use with students.

The second conference I attended was “We like our blogging buddies: The write stuff with blogging mentors” – in this conference the instructor, Kathy Cassidy, discussed how her first grade students were paired with university students (Pre-service teachers) as part of a class on the writing process.  The college students gave the first grade students feedback on their writing and they also talked to each other using skype. I think it would work really well to follow her process – but pair students in the lower grades with high school students.