Professor Matt Bower

There is no technologies in school education conference in Australasia. It would be useful to have the ICT Innovations Centre host such a conference.

Some possible conference names:

• Research on ICT in Schools Australasian conference (RICTSA)
• Research on Technology in School Education Australasia (RTSEA)
• Research on Technology Enabled Learning in Schools Australasia (RTELSA).

There are several directions educational technology research can take:

* There is some research that can be based on improved interfaces (hardware, software, eg multitouch, multi-user smartboards) TECHNOLOGY
* Others focuses on improved access to content (Knowledge bases, archives eg globaltelescope) CONTENT
* Improved access to others (eg Google Wave, Web-conferencing) INTERACTION

BUT these should all be focused on another more important underlying question – what is it that students are learning LEARNING and how do the approaches improve what they learn PEDAGOGY.

The PEDAGOGY is the management of the TECHNOLOGY, CONTENT, and INTERACTION, and this affects LEARNING.

Some awesome new sites/products include:

• Photosynth.net
• worldwidetelescope.org
• Kodu
• officelabs.com (eg pptPLEX)

Office 2010 new features:

• PPT: easier embed of videos into ppt from file, site or clip art and perform some minor editing (styles, shapes, trim, crop, fade)
• PPT: broadcast capabilities eg Skydrive or Sharepoint
• Can save any files direct to Sharepoint
• Word now has true simultaneous editing
• OneNote has new collaboration features, such as user identification when collaborative editing
• Ink-to-Math

Multipoint is an SDK that will work with Office 2010 allowing up to 25 students to use a mouse (eg wireless) at a time on the one computer. The server edition will allow keyboards to also be simultaneously used.

Microsoft Surface – a multi-touch-table with software running on top of Windows 7 (collaboration with nsquared)