My Trip to TCEA 2006

The Texas Computer Educators' Association Convention is held annually in Austin, Texas and features a large collection of technology vendors and educators sharing products, information, and teaching strategies. What follows is a summary of the meetings and workshops I attended while at the convention along with the associated hyperlinks and relevant information.

Tuesday, February 7- Update for Texas High School Cisco Academy Instructors

This session was for teachers who are a part of the Cisco Academy. If you are not familiar with this program, it is a curriculum developed and maintained by the Cisco corporation, the world's premier manufacturer of networking equipment. The academy contains a wide variety of courses. We offer the HP IT Essentials class along with the CCNA class at New Summerfield. (See http:/cisco.netacad.net for more details. )

Gay Berryman and Glenn Wright, both education consultants for the Cisco Academy, lead this meeting and provided updates and current information relative to what we do as instructors in the academy. We broke into groups and discussed successes and challenges we have experienced at our respective academies. A few sites I found interesting and potentially beneficial to Cisco instructors were...

CCNA Prep Center at http://forums.cisco.com/eforum/servlet/PrepCenter?page=main (Registration required)

Peter Packet game at http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/779/edu/peterpacket2/deliverables/main.htm

Subnet Slingshot game at

http://forums.cisco.com/PrepCenter/game/index.html

We also heard from Susan Weatherly, Area Academy Manager for the Cisco Corporation. She provided additional information about the future of the academy program and other tools of which we can take advantage. Lucy Ybarra from TEA talked about her role as Career and Technical Education chief for the agency. She also talked about future plans to include the Cisco courses into the state plan for career/technology education.

Wednesday, February 8

8:00-8:45-Using CSS to Add Style

This workshop was for webmastering instructors who wanted to learn how to use Cascading Style Sheets for web page design. It was conducted by Jean Langston and Daniel O'Kilen of Fort Bend ISD. During the time we waited for the presentation to begin, humorous error messages cycled upon the screen. These were created using Atom Smasher's Error Message Generator, which can be found at http://atom.smasher.org/error/ I found them to be pretty funny.

The CSS information was helpful, especially since webmastering instructors have the need to teach students a certain level of consistency and uniformity. Here are some links to good CSS-related pages:

http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/
http://www.utexas.edu/learn/css/
http://friendlybit.com/articles/css/
http://www.mako4css.com/

9:00-11:00 - Exhibit Hall

Visited with colleagues and attended several sit-down sessions in the exhibit hall. About half my time was spent at the Novell booth talking to representatives about the coming installations for our school. I also tried to collect as much information as possible about products that we can use to better manage our Novell servers. www.novell.com

11:00-11:45 - NASA: Inspiring Hispanic Students

This workshop was presented by a teacher who works with NASA to develop kid-friendly programs, especially those that assist in science and math instruction. The agency has developed a Kids Science News Network and its Spanish counterpart- Noticiencios NASA. The sites targeted for various age groups are noted below:

The NASA Sci-Files (targeted for grades 3-5) Has episode guides, lesson plans, multimedia, etc.
NASA Connect (targeted for grades 6-8) Has episode guides, lesson plans, multimedia, etc.
Kids Science News Network (NASA-related science news for students)
Noticiencias NASA (The Spanish version of KSNN)
Destination Tomorrow (30-minute programs that focus on NASA research and accomplishments- past, present, and future)

12:00-12:45 - I Love Technology in Science

This workshop was presented by Wade Carrington, a science instructor in the Hurst-Euless-Bedford district. He shared ideas that incorporate Word, Excel, Publisher, Power Point, and the Internet and allow students to work on the technology TEKS while using these skills to better their knowledge of science. He offered a CD to all teachers attending but ran out long before I was able to get one. When the promised information is posted on the TCEA web site or a I receive an email from this presenter, I will update the information here.

1:00-1:45 - Bilingual Education and Technology

This workshop was presented by members of the Mount Pleasant school district and focused on their efforts to assist bilingual students with funding from a state TARGET grant. The presenters offered data about their program, which featured:

• Visuals to accompany language instruction
• Using concrete tools to enhance acquisition of abstract principles
• Use of digital curriculum such as United Streaming to enhance learning
• Using graphic organizers such as Kidspiration to contextualize vocabulary
• Collaboration among faculty members with workshops and coaching
• Videoconferencing opportunities, such as those available from the San Diego Zoo
• Projects-based instruction

I also found out that http://www.onekey.com offers a safe way to do web searches.

2:00-2:45 - The workshop I planned to attend was cancelled - Took a break for a Coke and some M&Ms

3:00-3:45 - Prepping for an OpenSource Linux Deployment in K-12

This workshop focused on the efforts of Alan Sizemore and his colleagues in the Wichita Falls school district to convert more of their hardware away from Microsoft and to open source operating systems such as Linux. Alan reported that they had to scale the deployment back because so many of their applications demanded Microsoft-based operating systems to work properly.

For those of you not familiar with open source, this category of software involves operating systems and applications that are not proprietary, meaning that they are free to use, distribute, and modify. Using open source software can result in considerable cost savings for schools, but involves some problems as well.

He reported that, to convert most of the applications that schools use, such as Accelerated Reader, Follett, Destiny, and GradeSpeed, should be moved to the browser-based versions before trying to go all open source. They began with 800 desktop units, which they planned to be running open source software, but ended up with only 200 or so that actually remained this way.

Our school has been using Linux-based servers for several years now, and we are moving to install more open source software on servers and desktops in the near future.

For more information about open source software visit the following web sites:

Linux.org
Open Source Initiative
Free Software Foundation
K12 Linux in Schools Project

We were having some problems with equipment at the school, so I had to return to New Summerfield and was not able to attend any sessions on Thursday, February 9.