During the SETA conference I attended three sessions; one was the introduction by the Keynote speaker, the other was called “Marco Polo” and the last session I attended was about digital video production.

        The Keynote speaker was Mark Billington and he offered the audience many ideas to think about. He talked about leveling the playing field so that the student is not the only person learning. He said to have the student tell you what he or she knows and to sit back and allow the student to teach you. Another good point that he made is that in order to teach technology we must bring people to technology, instead of bringing technology to the people. What he meant by this is that we as teachers must find things that interest individual people. Not all people are going to enjoy doing the same things with technology. For example if a student is interested in drawing but is not interested in web pages, then you can introduce to them the Wacom tablet, which allows you to draw on a pad that is connected to your computer.

          In the Marco Polo session we were introduced to the web site http://marcopolo.worldcom.com/ and we learned the history behind the web site, but more importantly we learned what we could use the web site for. Marco polo is free, has a teacher’s guide that you can download, has links, and lesson plans, all of which are standard based. If you are looking for a specific topic for a lesson plan Marco Polo allows you to type in any topic that you wish to find, and it will take you to lesson plans that correspond with your search. On the home page there are links that allow you to go to a certain subject and look for lesson plans. These topics include economics, math, art, science, humanities, and geography. We were able to look through most of these links and I found many lesson plans that I plan on going back to.

          During the digital video production we learned how to make our own video using imovie. This particular software is found on the Macintosh computer. This session was taught by Mark Billington, and he gave us many useful tips on how to use imovie, and what things we could do with imovie.

          All of the sessions that I attended will be very useful to me in the future. When I am a teacher I can use some of the advice that Mark Billington gave, I can use Marco Polo to find unique activities and lesson plans, and I can use imovie if I wanted to make an educational video, or a class video for the students parents to see at the end of the school year.

          Our presentation went well, although I wish that more people had attended. Everything went as scheduled, and our power point and poster helped to present our information clearly and accurately. The students/teachers that attended our session seemed to be very involved with what we were introducing to them, and weren’t afraid to ask questions.

          If I had to do this all over again, the only thing that I would want to change is the number of people who attended our session. Our information was very useful and organized, and I had hoped that more people would have been introduced to inspiration.