Attending the National Educators Computing Conference (NECC) was an absolute blast!! The conference was held in the Henry B. Gonzalez Conference Center in downtown San Antonio. And I thought our Civic Center was grand. This center had 4 levels of halls and conference rooms several that could hold several football fields. The Grand Hyatt also was pressed into service for quite a few sessions.
The actual conference started Sunday but I was able to arrive a day earlier to check the place out. I attended a two day photography workshop sponsored by Adobe. I will post some of the images that I captured. I also learned about some very interesting activities that are very classroom friendly to really engage our students into learning.
I was able to attend about 8 workshops a day. All were very engaging and user friendly. The emerging technologies are amazing. I was particularly interested in ideas to use with the available technologies we have on campus. Yes, even if you have only one computer or a dusty one ( shame on you if you do ). I covered all the content areas (TAKS) science, math, reading, writing even music and its key relationship the content areas .
The underlying theme was that the state testing objectives can be met outside the "state prescription box". Meeting the needs of all the students in your class was an overriding theme dealing with Multiple Intelligences (MI seems to be the new buzz word).
All or most of the presenters posted their presentations and resources to the conference website and will update them some more. I have posted the url to the conference website which is .
The conference tried a new format in the sessions called BYOL (Bring your own laptop) which I thought was great. I was able to download or link to there presentation from so my need to take notes was at a minimum. Also links were provided to FREE Resources. It is amazing the availability of so many free writing, math,reading programs that have been develop by a lot of colleges. One in particular was a college in Florida (Florida Center for Instructional Technology) that has audio books for free download (mp3 formatt) according to reading levels. The section log on to is Lit2Go, check it out. You can browse by category, topic, author, and reading level. This can be accessed through their website . A lot of the stories are published works out of copyright. If you have any students the would benefit from the auditory or who need auditory as part of their IEP.
The writing workshops stressed blogging as an essential part to writing and particularly writing with voice.
I will post images from the San Antonio trip at within a week or two need to edit about 500 images. Time to go by the way on the 15th of July we will interview for a new principal at Douglass (Prayer Time!!) Please take the time to respond, it works better that way :)
