Craig’s keynote

The final session at this year’s TNT Conference is a keynote by Craig Nansen, Technology Coordinator for Minot Public Schools. Here’s my best attempt to capture his talk. Craig has published much of the materials from his talk today at his homepage.

Learn technology on your own time by personalizing it and by having fun, taking risks (don’t be afraid to be embarrassed), and learning from kids. Too many teachers feel like they have to wait until they understand the technology completely before they use it with their students. Give up! Embrace the opportunity to empower students to be teachers. Be willing to laugh at yourself.

Craig’s talking about digital natives and how they think differently. He told a story about his son who got home from hockey practice and called his buddy’s pager. His friend was out riding his snowmobile, got the page, and called him back on his cellphone. Craig’s son took off on his snowmobile and met him out in the country. What an amazing change from just a few years ago.

“Just in time” training is more important than ever. Teach just enough so the teachers can get the job done. They are most engaged in learning when they see the immediate use. You can engage with those teachers later and teach more as they see more and more uses. (We’re hoping to use some more online learning resources for this in Hopkins.)

There was a ton of other information, but there’s no way I can type fast enough to capture it all. Craig’s talk was a wild ride through some of the best materials he’s collected over many years of leading the technology charge in Minot.

Video conferencing session at TNT

Here are my notes from this morning’s session, “Enhancing the K–12 Classroom Through Videoconferencing”

North Dakota is a relatively large, sparsely populated state. Other than the largest cities like Fargo, Bismark, and Grand Forks, most kids attend school in geographically isolated communities. The state of North Dakota has been aggressive in building high-speed Internet connections between all of the state entities (including all K–12 schools) in order to expand opportunities to make connections between schools and to sites outside of North Dakota.

The North Dakota video conferencing network can use analog technology or the H.323 video standard over IP. Using the state video network, any school can make a point-to-point call to any other school in the state any time for free. The network also supports multipoint calling with up to ten sites participating simultaneously.

Some examples of video conferencing in the classroom:

  • SeaTrek provides multimedia science programming where students can connect live with persons who might be in a rainforest or underwater and ask them questions.
  • The Cleveland Music Institute has music education and professional development programs.
  • The Albany Institute of History & Art has programming related to colonial life in America, mummies and ancient Egypt, America after the Civil War, and various art topics.
  • The Baseball Hall of Fame has video conferencing programs for 10 different curriculum areas.
  • The RAVEN Project at the National Aviary uses a video-enabled robot that moves around amongst the birds at the aviary.

Other video conferencing opportunities can be found at NoodleTrip, a database of sites that provide content over video. I bought a number of Apple iSight cameras recently and I’m hoping to get some of our teachers involved with video conferencing next year.