"We have always wrestled with the place that technology holds in our society."- Dina Strasser

And boy did we ever wrestle with technology today. The 9th annual THV Summer Institute kicked off with a riveting keynote by top education blogger Dina Strasser (pictured below), who challenged us to be both critical and open to technology. 

Photo Credit: Bill Urbin, NPS

Dina set the room abuzz with questions such as, "In what ways does technology add to or subtract from your learning goals?" and "What are the gifts and risks of technology in education?" 

A few key takeaways from her talk:

• Loved this quote from Socrates, dissing the alphabet of all things, "[T]his invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory...You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding." Sound familiar?

• All tech is a trade-off. 

• When technology is introduced, it doesn't just add to society, it changes it in fundamental ways - printing press, TV, Internet. Like adding a drop of dye to a beaker of water. 

• She urged us to approach technology with what Richard Louv, author of The Last Child in the Woods and more recently, The Nature Principle, calls the hybrid mind, balancing the virtual with the real. "The more high-tech we become, the more we need nature."

• We need to be conscious and help kids learn about -- the environmental and labor costs of technology.
• For the first time in history kids are learning technology before us. They are our teachers, too. That makes them stronger partners.

 
Photo Credit: Bill Urbin, NPS

While these attendees had fun at A Point in Time: Using Global Positioning Systems with Blake Etchison, educator, Albany Pine Bush, I caught Extending the Impact of Field Trips With Technology & Social Media led by Dave Conover of Clearwater. A few takeaways from his session:

• Technology can make field experiences great, especially when it taps the creativity of the student vs. just feeding them information

• How learning and teaching are structured is at least as important as the concepts being taught

• Pre- and post-field trip programming is available for most field trips, yet few teachers avail themselves of the opportunities

• While we begrudgingly acknowledged the reality of dwindling funds for field trips, one attendee suggested that there are a lot of technology grants out there, and tying a field trip with a technology project (making videos, geocaching, etc.) is a creative way to get field trip funding (and don't forget THV Explore Awards and Bus On Us grants for visiting Hyde Park)

Susannah Renzi of Dutchess BOCES (pictured above at the GPS workshop) did a session called Connecting Live with History. This was about how to use Skype to do virtual field trips:

• Virtual field trips allow you to visit sites that you may not have access to otherwise

• Lots of children's book authors use Skype to connect with kids in the classroom

• Teachers are looking to collaborate with other teachers via Skype

• If you want to find a local destination to connect with, call first. Many are not on Skype but might try it. 

• We did a live Skype field trip with the Albany Institute of History & Art, which sends a trunk of artifacts to touch and examine before, during, and after the Skype session

• Check out Skype's education community

 

Final workshop of the day was packed! Diving Into Google Earth by Ed Sharron, science communications specialist, Inventory and Monitoring, NE Temperate Network, National Park Service. The crowd was oohing and aahing a lot. Google Earth has seemingly infinite uses. Some possibilities that Ed showed and discussed:

• Pollution modeling based on location of coal-fired power plants

• Flying over highways

• Soaring in a topo map

• Layering history maps 

• Habitat layers

• Lots more ideas at Google Earth Library

These are just the workshops I could attend! We'll put more photos, the presentations and hopefully some videos online in the coming days. 

Tomorrow is field experiences, where we all head out of the conference center and into some special places in the Hudson Valley. 

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