ITEST Program PIs and and ITEST LRC personnel participated in the recent NECC conference. To see a description of—and links to—sessions involving ITEST projects, see LRC Liaison Alyssa Na’im’s post here: http://itestlrc.edc.org/itest-projects-istenecc-2009

Before the official start of NECC, LRC Principal Investigator Joyce Malyn-Smith and LRC Liaison Suzanne Reynolds-Alpert attended the TeraGrid Bridge Conference in Arlington, VA. The general topic for the day for on Computational Thinking. The LRC will be disseminating some of the great resources discovered during this one-day conference soon!

The LRC continued to expand its social media outreach and dissemination activities in Washington, DC at NECC. ITEST Project Liaison Suzanne Reynolds-Alpert used twitter to “tweet” updates from various conference venues and also began a blog to increase awareness of ITEST among formal and informal educators and educational technology advocates. NECC, overall, provided LRC staff an opportunity to meet with some ITEST PIs, connect with other STEM educators, and learn about the current “best practices” for using technology to aid learning both in and outside of the classroom.
• To follow the LRC’s twitter, go to: http://twitter.com/ITEST_LRC
• To search twitter for NECC-related tweets, go to twitter and enter “#NECC2009” (no quotes) in the search bar.
• To see some blogging begun at NECC, visit: http://necc2008.ning.com/profile/Suzanne93. The next post will involve some other themes from Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote, and how these relate to ITEST.