The community of science educators who started NDeRC have been working together at the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center for about 10 years. During that much time, we’ve picked up a lot of collaborators. For the past four years, we’ve sent a number of members to the Supercomputing Education Program series. This year was the first year we’ve included a graduate student–Ryan Connaughton–in that mix. Ryan, Washington High School science department chair Tim Hardt, Pat Mooney and myself made the trip to Austin. Together we helped put on a number of the presentations to K-12 teachers: see Tim Hardt’s on using mashups in a classroom, and mine on collaborative tools for k-12 eScience, for examples. One of the conference highlights for us was the remote participation of Adam Frey, co-founder of Wikispaces: see the presentation, with screencasting of the event, embedded here. Although we experienced a significant delay in the Q & A part of the remote session, on the whole we succeeded in designing an environment for a remote and interactive presentation, held live on the web and archived for posterity, using only tools which are free to K-12 educators. (The tools we used were Wikispaces, uStream, Google docs, Flickr, and a screencast program…well, alright, I used Camtasia Relay for the screencast, which has a cost associated with it, but that was only because I hadn’t yet come across “screencast-o-matic.com”, which provides a free screencasting service.)
Below is a Flickr slideshow of images I took at the conference, including many images of conference sessions, the exhibit floor, and a walking tour of downtown Austin, all in no particular order.