LEARN NC Fall 2010 Interactive Conference

Yesterday, October 14, I attended an interactive conference hosted by LEARN NC. The first session was on Blended Learning and the presenters were Nancy Mangum, Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at NC State University; and Bobby Hobgood, Ed.D. I had heard of blended learning before, but wasn't exactly sure what it was. What was very interesting is that the presentation modeled what blended learning is or could be. We all came up with ideas of what we thought blended learning was, shared those ideas with the group and the presenters wrote down on the SMART Board what we said, brainstormed more ideas using Bubbl.us, and then we posted the Bubble.us on Edmodo. By modeling collaboration in our "classroom", using a brainstorming tool, and some online learning, we learned more about Blended Learning. Thank you Nancy and Bobby for a very informative session.

Next was a session on Free Technology with Instructify. Instructify is a blog from LEARN NC. Jason Don Forsythe and Ross White presented this session. They talked about several of their favorite web tools that just happen to be free. The first on the list, and one of my favorites (although I use Glogster EDU), is Glogster. Glogster is a digital poster teachers and students can use for free. They also showed us Evernote and Weebly. Evernote is an online note taking application and Weebly allows you to create a free website.

The afternoon sessions were both in-person and virtual. The sessions were about what is on the LEARN NC website. Several of the items they talked about was the North Carolina digital history book, differentiated instruction, and articles on best practices.

Thank you LEARN NC for an informative conference.