NECC06 Day 3: Goodbye San Diego

Goodbye San Diego!

Today was vendor visits and a trip to La Jolla for a kayaking adventure where we saw a dolphin, Garibaldi fish, pelicans, stingrays, cormorants and a leopard shark.

On the tech side it was swag day with vendor visits. It gets overwhelming – fast. I agree with some of the posts that it is hard to cut through the junk and the sales pitches to just get info you want but they are all here. The things that made it into the going home swag bag or swag head are:

1) Best Buy sells the commercial Dance Dance Revolution Pads for $700 each and w/ two you can have kids play against each other. I think we are missing the boat here as another way to get kids moving.
2) Inspire-Data is an impressive new data analysis tool from the Kidspiration/Inspiration folks.
3) School Locker web base 100 meg storage for kids, 1 gig for teachers, $1/per user as show promotion.
4) Web based typing program - $250
5) There are at least 6 vendors for response systems but really none made especially for K4.
6) Kurzwiel has a new version the 3000 series.
7) Tapeless Backup systems were much cheaper than we thought and can use backup Exec.
8) Thin client Linux has sound problems.
9) Smart Tech was a big player here.
10) I did not get to see the updated versions of Bailey’s Bookhouse, Millie, Sammy, etc. Riverdeep booth was mobbed.
11) Folks from netTrekker showed me a “refined search’ option that allows searching by lexile scores.
12) The open source Ubanutu comes with a calendar module if you allow Ubanutu to become a server.
13) Wireless video device could only show motion video on ¼ of the screen. Promised that they would have a product in the fall
14) Video over IP – 3 or 4 vendors doing that.

And yes I should have links but the swag is packed for an early flight and my wife would kill me if I pulled it all out.

Resolutions to take home:

1) I think that teacher blogging may be a way to collectively due staff development around curriculum topics. I think that there are ways to have kids do this as well with private blogs or members only blogs and wikis.

http://www.supportblogging.com/ - Educational Blogging vs Social Networking Blogs

2) I will do a wiki project this year, teachers first, then kids. I have a couple of plane rides and long layovers to mull it over.

OK, I am done. Tomorrow I unplug and go off the grid while going up into the mountains and canyon lands of eastern OR. I hear that you can buy cold beer in San Diego, time to go find out if that is true.

Thanks for reading!
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