I hosted my own conference this week and approximately 18,000 people attended #edchat #iste11

Last summer I wrote a post about the emergence of new and emerging types of conferences for teacher professional development. In that post I mentioned the unconference, the online conference, and the edubloggercon but I also proposed the idea that with the plethora of great presentations and keynotes available online that people could curate their own conferences online by collecting links to and embeds of these resources on their own wiki or blog. In fact, many people have done this time and again but usually we don't think of these collections as conferences. Today I would like to propose another approach.

This week, at the ISTE Conference in Philadelphia, we had the formal conference, the ISTE Unplugged sessions, and Edubloggercon but there was also another conference going on there, one few people knew about, one I silently hosted. On yellow post-it notes I printed QR codes that linked to great talks, presentations, and keynotes addressing a wide range of education and technology issues that I would liked to have seen at the ISTE conference. Drawing inspiration from street artists like Banksy and Space Invader I posted these post-it notes all over the convention center on conference signage, pillars, walls, doors, tables, etc. One could get an entirely different conference by walking around the convention center and scanning these QR codes.


I have no way of knowing exactly how many people scanned these QR codes, the technology seemed to saturate the conference and I really didn't see many people scan any of these things. I also admit that I find the whole QR thing somewhat annoying but I couldn't think of a better way to subversively host my own conference at ISTE. So, in a way, I can now say that I hosted my own conference of which approximately 18,000 educators were in attendance.

So, here are a few examples of some of the presentations from my underground ISTE conference:

Free Assistive Reading Tools

I've been working with a special education teacher today trying to find some solutions for some of his students with reading disabilities and vision impairments. Mostly, looking to find ways to do both text to speech and speech to text.

As far as I can tell, there are only two real viable options for speech to text: the speech recognition tool that comes free with Windows 7 or Dragon Dictation which for the PC or Mac is still relatively expensive but for the iPhone or iPod Touch is free. (for a real good description of this visit Ira Socol's post, Writing without the Blocks).

As for text to speech, there are plenty of tools out there that will convert movable type to a spoken word mp3 file:

• - convert text to speech
• - convert text to speech (spoken by a cartoon avatar)
• vozMe - convert text to speech
• - convert text to speech

or to a more multimedia output:

• - If you can type, you can make movies. Text-to-Movie
• - text-to-speech talking avatar generator
• - Oddcast makes fun and interesting multimedia generator widgets. One of which is the Etrade talking babies widget.

These are all great, but they require two things:

1. That the student have access to an electronic typed version of what they need read to them, and
2. That the student have access to a computer in class.

Problem is, what the student needs read to them looks more like this:


than this:


The solution we came up with was the use of free optical scan tools like:

• - Free online tool that converts text from image files or PDFs to movable text in a DOC, PDF, RTF, or TXT file.
• - Free online tool that converts text from a picture file to text that can be copied and pasted.

First we take the pages of the student's textbook and scan them into a PDF file on our copy machine:
Then upload those files to one of the free OCR tools listed above to convert it to text. Then we take that text and convert it to an mp3 file using text to speech. From there, we can load the files onto an MP3 player that the student can use.
But, if we want to take this a step further, we could create QR codes for the audio files we created that the student could access with their own mobile device. We simply paste a small version of the code on the page that is read in the file. To do this we could use any of the following free tools:

• - QR Code reader
• - QR Code Creator
• - QR Code Creator
• - QR Code Creator
• - QR Code Creator

I wonder how long it will be before textbook companies will offer this accommodation themselves. Wouldn't it be great if a real book could be an auidobook?

Texas School Board Curriculum Survival Kit

#edchat #Texas @russgoerend

I can't help but get emotionally upset by the most recent turn of events in Texas. I am grateful that my children will not be going to school there any time soon. A couple months ago I spliced together this video on the matter and posted it to YouTube but had not taken the time to share it here until now:



Now, it appears there has even been some attempt by members of the Texas School Board to block student access to the very same open source curriculum I refer to in this video. Given the outrageousness of the curriculum they just passed 9 to 5 I am sure they will be successful in this initiative as well.

So, here is my new simple 3 step
Texas School Board Curriculum Survival Kit:

1.


2. Create your own wiki to make corrections and/or replacements to supplement the curriculum missing or misrepresented in the new textbooks (you could even have your students help you do this as a project). I am sure at least one of these tools will make it through the Board's filters:

• - Free wiki host. Allows you to create web pages that anyone with a password can quickly and easily edit. Great for community knowledge construction and information gathering.
• - Free wiki host. Allows you to create web pages that anyone with a password can quickly and easily edit. Great for community knowledge construction and information gathering.
• - Free wiki host. Allows you to create web pages that anyone with a password can quickly and easily edit. Great for community knowledge construction and information gathering.
• - Free wiki host that integrates well with other Google products.
• - Free wiki host. Allows you to create web pages that anyone with a password can quickly and easily edit. Great for community knowledge construction and information gathering.
• - Free wiki host. Has a drag and drop editor for easy page layout. Supports audio and video captions.
• - your online notebook based on wiki
• - Quick and easy to way to collaborate online with others. YourDraft creates an online document similar to Microsoft Word and gives you a URL of that document. Others you share the URL with can edit the document too without a password.
• Savable online text document that saves a copy of every edit. Kind of like a one page wiki.
• - Simple web publishing tool: copy and paste content then click publish
• - Free wiki host with a social element that allows users to create their own profile pages. Kind of a blend between PBwiki and Ning!.
• Couchit - Very simple wiki development tool.

(This could also be done with Zoho or Google Docs)

3. Use Quickmark to make QR Codes or Stickybits to make scanable bar codes that can be placed in the fraudulent textbooks which link to pages of your wiki that contain the information your students should be learning.

[Step 3 is derived from a project idea Russ Goerend (@russgoerend) and I came up with via a discussion on Twitter a few weeks ago.]