I attended the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Washington, D.C. this summer, and it was great to have some focused time to reflect on my teaching practices. It’s interesting to me that some of the real gems I took from the conference had more to do with learning and teaching than technology. But I’ll save those for another time, because, after all, NECC is a tech conference.

So here are ten tech treats from NECC 2009 (and who shared them and their Twitter name, where applicable):

1.    http://udltechtoolkit.wikispaces.com/About+UDL - Universal design for learning – think curb cuts for the classroom! EVERY teacher needs to think about how these accommodations could benefit many students (not just students with special needs). (via @KarenJan aka Karen Janowski)

2.    http://www.techmatrix.org/ - analyzes tech tools for reading, writing and math for various special needs. Think UDL – perhaps you’ll find something that will benefit many students – not just students with IEPs.

3.    http://www.readwritethink.org/ is a website developed by the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association. Links for the National Day on Writing October 20th, 2009.

4.    http://www.mathtrain.tv/ - Videos by middle school students, for middle school students, teaching various math concepts. Great place for students to get a genuine audience while teaching and learning math. (from Ihor Charischak)

5.    http://www.findsounds.com/ This search engines finds sounds on the internet that can be embedded into presentations, used as writing prompts, or…use your imagination! (I’ll take wagers on what middle school boys will search for first – and yes, they are there.) (via @attipscast aka Chris Bugaj)

6.   Science Leadership Academy. This is not just for science teachers. The SLA is an inquiry-driven, project-based high school in Philadelphia focused on 21st century learning. I heard the principal, Chris Lehmann, speak on Progressive Pedagogy and 21st Century Skills and was impressed with their approach and their results. In this link, you will find a his presentation slides and links to SLA's project planning worksheets which are first rate.

7. http://taggalaxy.de/ - Tag Galaxy grabs pictures from Flickr that have been tagged with a certain label and organizes them according to their related tags. I can see uses for teaching everything from vocabulary to verbal reasoning and beyond.

8.    http://vozme.com/index.php?lang=en Cut and paste any text and it will read it to a student; Students can install a bookmarklet in their browser to have any thing on the web read to them. (via @LParisi and @CSouthard)

9.    http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Audacity is free, downloadable sound editor. It gives you a visual of what you sound like so you can edit out pauses, ums, stutters, etc. This would be a great tool to help students practice speaking fluently for class presentations. (via @CSouthard and @LParisi)

10.    http://www.mathplayground.com/ Fun, interactive games for reinforcing math skills. Students love it. (via @CSouthard and @LParisi)

And if that wasn’t enough or you didn’t find something you can use or you just want more: Top 10 free Web 2.0 Tools Session by Steve Dembo http://prezi.com/117545/.

The silence was because the class next door was doing state required ISAT testing. What came next was because I still had a class to teach.

Silently, with gestures, students were put into small groups. I pointed to the board where the rules for the class were written (e.g. all communication was to be written or with pantomime), along with the 5 activities each group was required to complete. I pointed to Get scratch paper here to write notes on and Pick up activity 1 here, etc.

There were a few grumblers at first, but quickly most everyone got into it. Students worked silently, gesturing wildly to each other and writing notes to each other as they calculated, charted and mapped the increase or decrease in the House of Representatives from each state based on the last census. Silently, they drew triangles on a geoboard when given only the hypotenuse, and then calculated the length of the hypotenuse using the Pythagorean theorem.

As a teacher, it was challenging not to whisper suggestions. But I found it worked better to answer questions in writing and to show or draw errors rather than explain them. It was amazing how carefully students attended to my answers when they had to wait for me to write them out. The best moment came when students were plotting right triangles on the geoboard – points on a grid that they draw lines through to create geometrical objects. The instructions told the students to use a ruler to draw the lines connecting the points. They assumed that they were supposed to use the rulers to measure the sides of the triangles as well. By drawing loops from point to point to point, I was able to show them that they were to compute the sides of the triangles in generic units rather than in inches or centimeters. As I pointed this out to each group (always silently) the response was the same: The look of Ah Ha!

We have this bulletin board in our classroom that says “A Picture is Worth 1000 Words.” Hmm. I am wondering if something else is worth 1000 words…Ah Ha!