As my husband watched the Cowboys play in a pre-season game and I lay on the couch resting from cleaning house and yard work waiting for the dryer, a tweet caught my attention.

"I'm broadcasting the #elh2010 conference LIVE now. KEYNOTE speaker @ewanmcintosh on in a few minutes: http://bit.ly/x5gKE"

I clicked on the link and watched Ewan McIntosh's Keynote address for ELH 2010 Technology Conference near Melborne, Australia. While it would have been much nicer to be there in person, it was still great, participating from my couch. Here are some comments and websites from Ewan's Keynote.

Design thinking | immersion | synthesis | ideation | prototyping

First Day of school, use a Google form to find out what types of technology your students have so you can take advantage of what they have.

"Even web/cloud based services can be safe learning environments. Still many schools building replicas & spending unnecessarily."

During this conference, "take some ideas forward & build prototypes for learning" He talked about creating a safe environment where things can be tried and tested and where it is okay to fail. I think high stakes testings make it very hard to create those types of learning environments.

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Here's my entry into the Epic Tech Fail Day stories.

I am responsible for the technology staff development of teachers in a middle to large school district in Texas and during our recent week long staff development event I taught a class on Twitter, Polls and Surveys. We usually have this staff development event at one of the high schools, but due to construction it was held at a middle school. Everyone brought their laptop so they could load TweetDeck and use their Mac or PC instead of the student computers in the room. They also were required to bring their cell phone. After we started we discovered that the wireless in the room was very poor and things moved so slowly, that they either used the ethernet cord from the student desktop or changed over to the student computer. Then when we got out the cell phones, no one had reception inside the room. They had to move around in the hall to get reception so they could respond to www.polleverywhere.com poll...

The Long Range Plan for Technology in Texas includes the recommendation that all Texas school districts,

"Strive to achieve and maintain a personal computing device ratio of 1:1 for both students and professional educators."

This sounds like the right thing to do, if we strive to equip our students to be competitive in this global society preparing them for the work place of their future.

Some districts have taken the charge to heart and have delivered, like Irving ISD who sold $47 million in bonds to provide laptops and other technology for their 31,000 students, many of whom are economically disadvantaged. Other districts are selling bonds to build much needed buildings and struggling to staff them or failing to staff them and are forced to leave the new schools empty. For those Texas schools who are operating with a deficit budget and struggling to make budget cuts without letting go staff members, a 1:1 ratio for student personal computing devices seems completely out of reach....

I just attended the 2010 Reform Symposium World Wide eConference while reclining on my own couch. What an incredible opportunity. I found out about it Friday evening while looking through some tweets from those I follow. I managed to get in to two sessions plus the closing remarks and it left me wanting more. Since it was all archived, I can go back and view all the sessions. It won't be quite the same as participating live, but it will be educational, non the less. The presenters were invited to present because they are active Tweeters and Bloggers on education and technology. They were not high dollar presenters. Looking at their profiles, they were teachers, professors and principals with something to share. It was all FREE. WOW... online, from home....great... free, what an awesome combination!

In these days of budget cut backs and travel restrictions, we are so blessed to have people who will step up and organize such first class...