The second day of the ECOO conference went well.  I enjoyed all my sessions yesterday and especially liked sitting down and chatting with other edubloggers.

The first session I attended was "Interactive Videoconferencing: Making I.T. Work" Obadiah George, Steve Smallwood from York University and York Region DSB.

Summary:

Their session was about the ABLE Project  (Advanced Broadband Enabled Learning) and the tools that they were using for videoconferencing.  The goal of the project is to improve student achievement and transform teacher professional practice.  To participate in the project there is a sliding scale that depends on the size of the school district.  George and Steve were very knowledgeable, and shared one of the resources they used VSEE Labs for some of their videoconferences.  VSEE allows you to videoconfernce through VSEE for a monthly fee and works well with firewalls as it can tunnel.

(As a side note, the day before Shawn pointed me in the direction of Isabel a linux application that can be purchased through Agora 2000 at a $2000 for a unit, which is a lot cheaper than the standard videoconference units.  You can then leverage your PBX on other videoconfernce units that you have for full functionality.)

The second session that I attended was "Why Reading Matters Even More in the Digital Age" by Clare Brett from OISE/UT. 

Summary: 

This was an excellent presentation on focus on preparing students effectively for learning from and with the Internet.  I was so glad that she was exploring blogs and wikis with such a large audience. Clare's presentation can be found on her blog posting .  Her weblog as well as the GRAIL project (Graduate Researcher's Academic Identity onLine) pages can be found here .

The third presentation that I attended was "e-Learning Ontario – Learning Object Repository."  I can't remember the names of the three presenters, one was Urs, I think (Carolijn MacNeil-Verbakel, Rob Policicchio, and Urs Bill)

Summary: 

I was very impressed with the K-12 LOR from what I have seen, and I have been very critical of the OKNL/eLearning Ontario's LOR in the past, so that is a big compliment.  I wish I could explore it more and give them some more feedback.  I really like what OISE/UT has been doing on the front end of the LOR.  The LOR can take any filetype that you can throw at it.  It seems to be well though out and has included different levels of collaboration from submission, tagging, reviewing, as well as a service level agreement that is very similar to the Creative Commons license.  The LOR, which might be available in September 2006, includes peer review by educators with similar interests.  The meta-data for the LO's are quite extensive and they are exploring feeds and the ability to subscribe to channels of LO content.

Here are my suggestions:

• To remove an LO for the repository means contacting someone by email, perhaps a more automated process should be included.
• The meta-data is too extensive and discouraging, although there might by only 8 mandatory fields this is not clear.  There are asterisked fields with blue highlights that seem to divide up the page rather than indicate required fields.  Maybe include a simple and advanced form, to avoid scrolling through all that meta-data.
• Home page – Go with big buttons rather than explanations under each of the main sections.  With an explanation on a mouse over of the image.
• Try to minimize the text throughout the application. 
• Continue the review process outside of the approval of the LO. 
• The whole OEN for student access by user name and passwords scares me.  The more levels of security you put in the less likely it is going to be used.

Although I have a few suggestions, I still think that the LOR looks great.  It will be a great tool for all educators in the province.

The last session that I attended was "Learning in Context" by George Siemen.

It was the kind of session that I wished I was back doing my Masters of Education and he was supervising me.  It was just amazing listening to his ideas.  My summary would not do the presentation justice, but George has posted a screencast of the presentation on his blog .  So you can get the real thing, instead of a poor attempt at summarizing.

I enjoyed the presentations that I attended at the ECOO conference for the most part today and hopefully those who attended my session on RSS took back some ideas. 

I had a fairly crowded room with about 60 educators who seemed very interested in RSS.  I had an interesting question relating to the immediacy of rss feeds and their use for instructional purposes, since they are not hosted locally if the site is down your lesson is shot.  But, like everything in teaching (especially online), you always need a backup plan.  I will post a more detailed outline of the RSS presentation for feedback soon and if I can get my act together, I will screencast it.

The first session I attended was "Expedition Everest – Connecting Students to the Top of the World" by Shawn Allen a Secondary IT Consultant for Ottawa-Carleton DSB was great.  It was amazing to see this project.

Summary:
OCDSB became a sponsor of an Mt. Everest expedition team, with a number of other sponsors.  Educators worked for a week to create lesson connections for the expedition and embed it in their curriculum.  Six high schools used videoconferences, photos, online chats, Blackboard LMS, and recorded audio chats to collaborate with the climbers. This project went so well that Expedition Africa http://www.africa.ocdsb.ca/is being planned for the fall.  The media from the project is archived at http://www.everest.ocdsb.ca/ Shawn also has a post on the session on his Video Conferencing in Education blog. 

The second session was on "Podcasting" by Robert Karulas from the Toronto DSB.  

Summary:
This session was an overview of podcasting with specific attention paid to pedagogy.  Robert is planning to post a podcast of the entire session on his new blog  so I won't go into any more detail.  There is also recent discussions at Toronto District School board on Podcasting Collaborative Learning Community blog.

The final session that I attended today at the end of the day was horrible and I will not mention it or give a summary of it.  I wouldn't want to insult anyone, since there needed to be a little quaility control at that presentation.

C18 Information Technology (IT) Leadership for School/District Coordinators Matt Norton Lethbridge School District No.51 This session will be a summary of best practices (research supported and personal experiences) for leadership in the areas of Information Technology (IT) integration, infrastructure and human resources. Participants are encouraged to share their own experiences (good and bad) from a schoolbased and district-based perspective.

- presentation through website @ http://www.lethsd.ab.ca/ecoo05/ Integration - Alberta based guiding IT Coordinator
- Helps to have the Alberta technology curriculum Leadership
- treat everyone as your friend – Goes through each of the four section on leadership for Techs, Ed Techs, Administrators, and Teachers Leader means:

-Always try and make things better than before – strive for excellence!

-Your actions are the application of your word – do as you say and say as you do (know your values – live your values)

-Focus on being the best for the world rather than the best in the world

-Relationships, relationships, relationships – treat everyone as if they were your friend
-Find balance between your work and the rest of your life
- Important to get Administrators on side without them whatever you do will not succeed.
- Easy to use means easy to manage from a district infrastructure point of view
- Identify the type of team members that you have on staff in order to understand each others strengths and weaknesses use tests such as the Myers-Briggs, DISC, Colors, and Conflict Profile .
- Interesting model for support where a half time ICT Technician is present at every school in order to provide, what is considered level 1 support. The board provides level 2 and 3 support.
- This School board stats: 8400 students, 440 teachers and 1.3 million ICT Department budget of total of 32 million board budget.

Resources: Information Technology Leadership Research, What can I do, as an administrator, to better support the integration of technology in my school?, Technology Plan Template for school action plans.

Books referred to in presentation: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable and Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead the People Who Deliver Technology