Technology in Education: Notes from the Closet

During the week of March 11, 2013 I had a chance to attend the DML2013 conference at the Sheraton in Chicago, Illinois.  This was my first time at this conference, thanks to my f ellowship with T.E.A.M . at Columbia.  It was different from any other conference I’ve attended.  Named “Digital Media and Learning” I had expectations of teachers speaking of digital projects.  No so.  The theme of this year’s DML was “ Democratic Futures : Mobilizing Voices, and Remixing Youth Participation ”.  It focused more on social justice and youth civics. It wasn’t necessarily a practitioner’s conference (at least in the sense I was used to).  It was refreshing to spend time in a forum like this.  My greatest “take-away” was that there are numerous organizations out there advocating for our youth.  As an educator this was inspiring as well as comforting.  Some of the organizations I learned about are listed below. ...

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting at the Illinois Computing Educator’s annual conference.  ICE 2013 was a fantastic conference with a great vibe (and I'm not just saying that because I'm on the planning committee).  One of the best parts about it, outside of being with phenomenal like-minded educators, is that so many of them are willing to share their talent.  There were over 250+ presentations given (and that was just during the general conference, not including the two days prior full of workhsops).   Presenters were willing to share their materials on ICE’s wiki:  http://www.icewiki.info   making content available to folks that couldn’t attend their session.  That’s just classy. My presentation was on Media Literacy. Media Literacy includes our interactions with media and the messages we take away from it. Its our ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create media messages (language that is found throughout  C...