I am here during my second day at the NECC Conference in DC along with several other folks from the writing project — Gail Desler of Area 3 WP, Sandy Hayes from Minnesota WP, Maria Angala from the DC Area WP, and Joe Bellino from Maryland WP. I’m sure there are others too!

Gail has already been blogging from here on Blogwalker. Here are a couple highlights from her Live from NECC series just to give you a sense … stay tuned for more — the conference runs through tomorrow.

I also attended the Scratch session and Resnick is definitely among my personal heroes in this work. And although this session was in a big ballroom and not particularly interactive, it was really interesting because we got to see so much student, and teacher, work. In addition to what Gail already shared above, he also shared examples from Karen Randall’s Room 209 at Expo Elementary in Minnesota that I thought were interesting as they show a range of projects (it would be wonderful to hear more from Karen herself about this work — and I noticed this wiki page she set up in Classroom 2.0). Resnick also showed us how the Scratch tools work quite a bit like legos (pretty cool!) and also how using sensor boards in Computer Clubhouses, students have been working to make real legos (and other real-world objects) interact with these online animations (see PicoBoard for more on this). He also announced this Creative Computing Workshop for teachers coming up in July at MIT (and emphasized that it was appropriate for all grade levels too).

In another session I was introduced to Remix America which looks like an interesting resource: “Remix America is a nonpartisan, nonprofit in-browser editing tool that allows citizens around the country to remix the great words and speeches of American History with the hot button issues of today.” And I participated in a birds of the feather session with teachers who are using Quest Atlantis in their classrooms across content areas.

More to come! Christina