Extreme Makeover – Dembo Style
Posted by Diane Zoellmer on February 26th, 2009
I’m in Chicago (St. Charles, Illinois to be exact) for the ICE (Illinois Computing Educators) Conference and all of the sessions so far have been winners! Dr. Yong Zhao (yes, Michigan’s Dr. Zhao) was their opening keynote. His presentation, “Never Send a Man to do a Machine’s Job: Reconstruct the Relationship between Teachers and Technology” was engaging and interesting. He had the standing room only crowd laughing thoughout his presentation. I’m hoping the ICE team has this archived for us.
One of the sessions I knew I couldn’t miss was Steve Dembo’s presentation “Extreme Makeover: Education Edition.” Steve will be doing a version of this at the MACUL conference in a couple of weeks. This session is really geared for Web 2.0 beginners although there were a couple of tools that were new to me 
Many times when showing new tools to teachers, the response is, “I don’t have time to learn that” or “my district can’t afford any new technology” or “that’s too hard for me.” Steve showed several free tools that educators can use immediately, without the steep learning curve that accompanies a lot of software.
- Blabberize
- Edublogs
- crappygraphs (you might not be able to use this at school)
- Let Me Google That For You
- embedding video
- Plodt
- Poll Everywhere
- Prezi (You can apply for a free account but it’s in beta and might not get approved for a while.)
If you have a few minutes try these out. Hopefully, you’ll be able to see Steve share this at MACUL, I hear he’s looking for audience participation 