Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Live from Ohio SchoolNet

T minus 20 minutes and counting until the start of my presentation "Web Logs in the Mathematics Classroom." I'm not expecting a huge turnout--2:00 is the last session of the last day. I figured that I'd take some time to jot down some thoughts and observations from this conference.

After scanning the session titles and descriptions for the Ohio SchoolNet Conference, I 've come to this conclusion: social software and the Read/Write Web have yet to catch on here in Ohio. Only two sessions (that I noticed) addressed these concepts: my session and another one by David Warlick on wikis and discussion forums. By the way, Warlick's session took place at the same time mine did (rats!), so no report on what he talked about.

In the exhibit hall, the themes were high stakes test simulations, data analysis, & content management systems. USE MY SOFTWARE AND YOUR KIDS WILL PASS THE STATE ACHIEVEMENT TEST! It's sad that so much time and energy is being wasted on getting kids to pass these tests. Imagine what technology we could have for the classroom if the minds that developed these products were not consumed with aligning software to state curriculum, but with creating engaging technology that didn't turn the computer into a drill and kill death machine.

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