Resources from @EdCampNYC at @The_School today

So, EdCampNYC happened. Yes, we will organize another. No, we will not start offering tickets months in advance. I’m grateful we had a more intimate crowd than I expected, but our costs would have been greatly lessened had all of the anticipated attendees arrived. The session board filled up seriously fast, and it was great to see all the tweets and resources shared throughout the day.

Had I not been an organizer, I would have led a session on Google Apps, integrated projects, paperless science journals, social networking in the classroom, professional development, media tools, offered a tour of the school and discussed the intentions of The School at Columbia University. Additionally, I would have been able to remain in a session for more than a few minutes and benefited from the conversations happening on three different floors. For next year, I am hoping to recruit some students to help at registration, act as hall monitors and tech support, and maybe lead a session on some of their projects.

A million thanks to our sponsors and everyone who organized, participated, and led sessions!

Our sponsors::

See the full gallery on Posterous

Our website: http://edcampnyc.org

Our wiki: http://edcampnyc.wikispaces.com

Our Flickr pool: http://www.flickr.com/groups/edcampnyc/

Our Twitter: http://twitter.com/edcampnyc

The main edcamp wiki linking to events in other cities: http://edcamp.wikispaces.com/

The TwapperKeeper archive of our #edcampnyc tweets:
http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/edcampnyc

A Twitter list of attendees created by Karen LaBonte – @klbz: http://twitter.com/klbz/edcampnyc# 

Another Twitter list of attendees created by Meg Wilson – @ipodsibilities: http://twitter.com/iPodsibilities/edcampnyc

Google Doc of participants: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AoZmqKegkFLAdC1MN3h3YjBHTlN5ajZNb05DT2ItREE&authkey=CO3ykIcM&hl=en#gid=0

Our (barely used) Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/EdCampNYC

The organizers are listed here: http://www.edcampnyc.org/?page_id=33

Ann Oro – @njtechteacher – for being the webmaster, ticket barker, and go-to gal throughout the planning

Annmarie Stoekel – @astoeckel – for securing sponsors and helping throughout the event

Basil Kolani – @bkolani – for securing sponsors, printing labels, and being omnipresent

Deven Black –  @spedteacher -for setting up our financials, being a sponsor, and helping at the event

Erik Weese – @brklynsurfer – for securing sponsorship and manning registration

Karen Blumberg – @SpecialKRB – for securing sponsors, representing on Twitter/Facebook/Gmail, and continuously editing/promoting/planning

Katy Gartside – @nykat4 – for creating the signage, responding to every email ever sent, organizing the door prizes, and stepping up at every opportunity

Laura Hollis – @laurahollis525 – for securing sponsorship, taking photos, and hosting the one (!) face-to-face meeting

Rita Chuhran – @rchuhran –  for designing the T-shirt and the brochure and manning registration

Sean Freese – @esinclair – for designing the labels, supporting the website, updating the Google Doc, and helping throughout the event

Free yolink, SweetSearch, EasyBib lessons licensed under CreativeCommons

http://www.yolinkeducation.com/education/iste/teacher.jsp

While ISTE10 was a whirlwind of networking, socializing, learning, presenting, and stockpiling Google schwag, my stint at the yolink booth was a total highlight. I was impressed by everyone on the yolink team and their partners sites, SweetSearch and EasyBib.

I was part of a group of educators who created lesson plans incorporating yolink, SweetSearch, and EasyBib. My lesson, License to Cull with Creative Commons, is meant to initiate conversations with students about Creative Commons and teach how to search/cite fair-use media. (I am still patting myself on the back for that title, by the way.)

We demo’d these lessons at the yolink booth at ISTE, and the lesson plans and slide decks were shared on USB drives handed out to people that came to our booth. The lessons are also all licensed under Creative Commons and shared via this awesome link: http://www.yolinkeducation.com/education/iste/teacher.jsp

Below are my lesson plan and slides for License to Cull with Creative Commons:

KarenBlumberg_CreativeCommons.pdf
Download this file

yolink_presentation.pdf
Download this file

Link up with yolink at ISTE

I’ll be at ISTE‘s annual conference in a few weeks. I still have to finalize what I will say/show at my presentation, “Collaborating with Google Apps in the 21st Century Classroom.” I’m equally proud and petrified that my session is sold out. I called ISTE in a panic to find out how many seats they assigned for my talk – 108! 

Here’s the catalog listing for my presentation at ISTE:
http://center.uoregon.edu/ISTE/2010/program/search_results_details.php?sessionid=50092524

In the meantime, I prepared a lesson for my stint at the yolink booth. I’ll be at their space on the Expo floor for two hours a day, 30 minutes of which will include a demonstration of how I use yolink and some of their partner services: Creative Commons, SweetSearch, and EasyBib. I’m particularly proud of my lesson’s title, License to Cull with Creative Commons. Get it?

Yolink scans a web search or a specific web page for keywords. Multiple keywords are individually color-coded, so visual (and/or impatient) learners can quickly scroll through paragraphs on a website to visibly locate those keywords. It’s easy, powerful, and free!

I was super honored to be featured in yolink‘s recent newsletter. Below is the link to the June edition of Education News from yolink:
http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs064/1102870834061/archive/1103480476293.html

Yolink and Sweet Search and Research, oh my!

I’ll be offering a presentation at ISTE in Denver in June on Collaborating with Google Apps in the 21st Century Classroom. I learned that “21st Century” trick from my boss – he’s had multiple proposals accepted to speak at a variety of conferences. Also, he deems the use of “Web 2.0” as quaint.

While at ISTE, I’ll also be spending some time at the Yolink booth talking about the product and sharing my experiences using it as a search tool in the classroom.

These are a few of my favorite things about Yolink:

1. It mines any Google search-results page or any text-based site for specific key words or phrases. As the Yolink evangelists put it, “It’s like Google with X-ray glasses!”
2. It color codes your search words so you can see which webpage includes which keywords and visually scan your search results before even opening a page.
3. It integrates seemlessly with Google Docs, so that a whole page or only specific paragraphs can be imported into a new Doc or an existing Doc. This is great for note-taking (and plagiarists), and it led to interesting discussions with some of my 6th graders yesterday.
4. Results can be fed to EasyBib to create instant citations of websites found.
5. Yolink results can also be fed to Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Diigo, Blogger, WordPress, Evernote, and Email to archive and share your results.

I also recently learned about Sweet Search. As their website states, it is a search engine for students and “searches only 35,000 Web sites that have been approved by our staff. SweetSearch allows students to choose the most relevant result from a list of credible results, without the distraction of unreliable sites.” How great is that?

I shared both of these site with the faculty and with my 8th graders today. The kids are all currently working independently on Social Action Projects; The goal is for students to pick a topic that interests them, research it, and follow through with some sort of corresponding action (community service, raising awareness, raising money). I’m currently sitting next to a terrific girl who chose Deforestation and plans to create a pop-up book to teach younger kids how to understand the effects of deforestation on our environment.

The 8th graders were really positive about both tools, as they were able to search more pointedly with Sweet Search while Yolink enabled them to scan through the results without even opening the pages. Win-Win.