Advancing Student Achievement Through Technology
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Spotlight Speakers


Arnie Abrams

Dr. Arnie Abrams is the author of ten best selling books, most recently Learn Digital Photography in a Day and Award Winning Digital Photography Projects. He is a nationally known authority on multimedia and digital storytelling.

The presenter is director of the Applied Multimedia Unit and professor of Art at Southern Oregon University. He has over twenty-five years of experience in making technology accessible to teachers. He has given workshops on multimedia and digital portfolios to school districts around the world. He served as Visiting Scholar at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He has served as an educational advisor to Corel, Crick Software and Nikon Cameras and has received several national grants.

His presentations at CUE, NECC, TCEA, FETC, and NCCE have drawn capacity crowds for several years. Dr. Abrams highly visual presentations are known to be practical and quick moving.

 Jump Start to Digital Storytelling

Arnie Abrams will share secrets of success for implementing digital storytelling in the classroom and how to use “digital story starters” to facilitate the process.

22 Terrific Techniques and Tips for Photoshop Elements 6

 Quick demonstrations of nearly two dozen techniques for working with Photoshop or Elements. These tips will be of use for both beginning and experienced users.

Dreamweaver Made Easy (or at least easier)

 If you need to learn or teach Dreamweaver, this is the session for you. Dr. Abrams will demonstrate the essential skills you need to know.
Hall Davidson | California Spotlight Speaker
Hall Davidson taught middle and high school English, mathematics, Spanish, and bilingual mathematics. He left the classroom to teach math on television in Los Angeles on an Emmy-winning program and spent 20 years at PBS stations teaching and leading staff developments in person and on-air. While producing television series on education and technology, he led a media consortium serving 17 districts and 200,000 students. He frequently contributes articles to national educational publications. With a team, he founded Kitzu.org, a resource of free online kits to encourage project-based learning with media. He served on the board of Computer-Using Educators for six years and consulted for media corporations and professional organizations. For a dozen years he coordinated the nation’s oldest student media festival, the California Student Media Festival. He was site chairperson at his children’s elementary school where the categorical budget required his signature. He joined Discovery Education in 2005 where he blogs, creates webinars, and works in educational partnerships as a director of the Discovery Educator Network, connecting thousands of teachers nationwide. He has spoken about technology and education to audiences around the world.

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Ten Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Video Clips

Web 2.0, cellphones, and fantastic new sites mean that you can build, bend, and make meaningful video material in the classroom. From low tech to high tech, avatars, talking monuments, rain, captioning, chromakey, and more merge curriculum for the media minded students you teach. Learn what you can and can’t do!

It’s in Your Pocket: Teaching Spectacularly With Cellphones

Cellphone technology leaps forward with staggering speed. Input merges into PowerPoint, interactive voting, instantaneous web broadcast, voice to text, and many other applications that make administrators, teachers, students (and conference attendees) fire up this powerful multitool for education. Time to catch up with the world’s most pervasive medium. Bring your phone, your fingers, your voice and be amazed!

The Revenge of the Digital Immigrants:
Teaching with Media Technology

What veteran teachers suspected the research has proved: 21st Century students are different. With different attention spans, higher IQ test scores, and social networks, their sophistication comes earlier—with a different skill set. There is a silver lining: We can teach this “New Brain” more effectively, more efficiently, more engagingly. We have the technology! Media has evolved and education must evolve to match. See how!
Vicki Davis
Vicki Davis is a teacher and the IT director at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia. Vicki co-created three award winning international wiki-centric projects, the Flat Classroom project, the Horizon project, and Digiteen. These projects have linked more than 1000 students from both public and private schools in such countries as Austria, Australia, Bangladesh, China, Japan, Spain, Qatar and the US. These collaborative projects harness the most powerful Web 2.0 tools available including wikis, blogs, digital storytelling, podcasts, social bookmarking, and more. Vicki has been featured in various media including Thomas Friedman's book, The World is Flat, Don Tapscott's Book Grown Up Digital,  the Wall Street Journal, and the Boston Globe.

Vicki blogs at the Cool Cat Teacher blog www.coolcatteacher.blogspot.com which won the 2008 Edublog Award for the  Best Teacher Blog in Education. The Flat Classroom Project won the edublog award for Best Wiki in Education in 2006, and 2008.  Her first book, ClickSmart will be published in 2009.

Vicki Davis's session will be presented on Friday, March 6.		 7 Steps to Flatten Your Classroom

Connecting your classroom to other classrooms in the world need not be overwhelming. Learn the seven steps to successfully, safely connect your classroom in meaningful ways that will enhance your curriculum and excite your students.

Wonderful World of Wiki Wiki Teaching

This award winning teacher uses a wiki-centric classroom.
Learn about the basics of wikis, their use in cooperative learning strategies, and some cool tips and tricks to make assessment and management easier.

Blogging for a Better Classroom

Learn how teachers can blog and comment their way to a better classroom -- this is based on 10 Habits of Bloggers that Win and How to Comment Like a King or Queen from Cool Cat Teacher.

Differentiated Instruction and Assessment with Technology

Take a look at learning styles and today’s most current Web 2.0 tools to understand what differentiation looks like in a technology enhanced classroom. Learn about the classroom structure that will reach all learners.
Tammy Worcester

Tammy Worcester has over twenty years of educational experience. She began her career in the classroom, teaching various grades from kindergarten to middle school. While teaching, Tammy also served as the technology coordinator for her K-8 school.

For the past ten years, Tammy has worked for ESSDACK, an educational service center, as an Instructional Technology Specialist, providing staff development and training in the area of technology integration.

Her website, “Tammy’s Technology Tips for Teachers” www.tammyworcester.com is a popular online resource for teachers around the world. Tammy has developed several software applications for teachers and is the author of several best-selling technology resource books that are published and marketed nationally.

Tammy is extremely innovative and resourceful and specializes in finding unique and creative ways to use traditional computer tools in the classroom. She enjoys sharing her ideas with teachers throughout the nation and has a presentation style that can be described as inspiring.

Tammy’s experiences as a parent, a teacher, a technology director, and a training specialist have allowed her to develop a strong sense of best educational practices. Those skills, coupled with her technology expertise, enable her to collaborate with other educators to build models of effective technology implementation that will have the potential to truly transform schools.

Rev Up Your Reading & Writing Classrooms with Technology

Want some clever ideas for using computers in your reading and writing classrooms? This session will feature dozens of quick and easy tools and activities that you can use immediately! We will explore a series of innovative activities through which you will learn how to use the Internet and other electronic tools to support literacy, word processing, and the publishing of students’ work.

Math + Technology = Learning

In this session, you will learn how to use common computer programs in clever ways for teaching and learning mathematics. See how math lessons and learning can be enlivened, enhanced, and updated through the integration of resources and tools found on the Internet and on the classroom computer. Explore some fascinating ideas and resources that will inspire both teachers and students. You’re guaranteed to go away with many ideas you can implement tomorrow with your students!

Cool Computer Activities for Science and Social Studies

Are you looking for new and creative ways to use the computer in your science or social studies classroom? This session is packed full of clever ideas for quick and easy-to-create projects that are aligned with national standards. You’ll be amazed at how these simple activities will excite your students while taking their learning and thinking to a new level.

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