PATINS State Conference 2008!!! I know, I know it’s not even May, but this past December’s PATINS State Conference was a such a positive event and we’ve already been in the planning stages for several weeks now to make the next one even better. There will be 45 minute General Sessions as part of this year’s conference and we need the outstanding educators, therapists, administrators, tech. directors, media specialists, etc., who read this blog, to consider submitting a proposal to present one or more of the great things you are doing with and for your students!

• The Call For Papers for General Sessions can be submitted online by filling out the form here:
  http://www.patinsproject.com/callforpapers.htm
• This year’s conference will be held at the Crowne Plaza (same as last year) on November 10th, 11th. So, get those dates on the calendar and into the budget now.

PATINS ‘08 Tech Expo: The 2008 PATINS Tech Expo was a big success! Attendees that I talked with seemed to be very excited about new ideas they had for all the new technology they were seeing and hearing about. I got very excited about several new things I saw as well! Something I’ll likely be doing a workshop on in the Fall will be placing tests or other pieces of digital reading material onto portable devices like iPods w/out a teacher ever having to read the test and the student being able to hear and see the text highlighted as it’s read by the iPod or other device.
Click Here for Photos from the Tech Expo!

A couple more from the iPod 100 page:

• iPod Lessons and General iPod How-To:Learning In Hand, iPods in Education from Tony Vincent… A true EXPERT when it comes to iPods and PDAs in classrooms! Everyone, whether or not you love portable content, should visit and become familiar with Tony’s work. Here’s a quick screenshot of the site, which should be enticing enough! Particularly interesting to me at the moment is using iQuiz quizzes on iPods coupled with my Self-Operated iPod Prompting system:
  

• Gabcast again: What a cool tool! I posted briefly about Gabcast as a free way to podcast from your phone (land or cell) back on 3/7/08 (HERE) and have since started really using it myself. I’ve created a free account for myself and the first couple episodes are just Sandy and I testing it out. The third episode is a very short (24 seconds) interview of yesterday’s Skype, Wikis & Blog workshop here in Columbia City. Basically, once your Gabcast account is set up, podcasting really couldn’t be any easier! I simply call a 1-800 number and then punch in my podcast code and then I start talking! As soon as I’m done, I simply push the #2 on my phone which immediately publishes the podcast to the public RSS feed! In other words, within 10 seconds of me publishing by pushing the #2 on my phone, anyone in the world could be listening to that podcast episode! That’s powerful! HOW COOL, for a teacher to podcast a 2 minute note to parents at the end of the day in this way, or for students to do this while on a field trip, or while interviewing other people (which hits a lot of state standards), etc! Obviously there really isn’t any editing or fancy intro/outro music when podcasting this way, but it’s so easy and with most phones, the quality is really quite acceptable, even for an audiophile like myself! If you are interested in subscribing to my Gabcast, here is the RSS feed: www.gabcast.com/casts/19096/rss/rss.xml In iTunes, subscribe by clicking Advanced and the Subscribe to Podcast and then paste the above URL into the text box, like this:

~EduChallenge #5~

Ok, this is pretty simple. I raved for a couple weeks there (3/21 and 3/28) about the Firefox Add-On called Hyperwords, to “make every word on the internet interactive.” I am still absolutely loving this FF Add-On and I think it’s quite possibly the easiest, quickest and most effective way to instantly give students at both ends of the achievement spectrum a very beneficial tool for almost every aspect of the general education curriculum! The challenge this week is to:

1. Get or make sure you have Firefox on your computer. (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/)
2. Go get and install the Hyperwords Add-On. (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1941)

And that’s it! I’ve given direct links to both places you’ll need to go, so it’s just a matter of clicking! Next week we’ll build on using Hyperwords in your classrooms, so get it installed this week!

..and submit a Call For Papers!
http://www.patinsproject.com/htm/trainop.html