Wednesday, May 26, 2010

MLTI Student Tech Conference

by Sarah Sutter

students presenting at MLTI tech conference

MLTI Student Tech Conference 2008

Tomorrow morning at 5am I will be on a bus with 40 7-12th graders headed for the largest student tech conference in the state. The kids are excited to go and be part of the 1000 participant event, learning from and with students in workshops with topics like Scratch with an MIT Scratch team member, internet radio streaming by kids, Legos & robots, Alice, Google Earth & Maps, and so much more. Most of the workshops are led by the students and a teacher or two, sharing what wonderful things they’ve been doing with technology in the classroom this year.

MLTI student tech conf 2009

Final Session with 800+ students with laptops. Photo by Alice Barr

The final session is after lunch, and involves all 1000 student participants and the chaperones. This year the focus is on social action and global connections, and one tool we’ll be using is FreeRice.com Now, I know many of you have used this with students already, but this time we’ve got a stand alone Free Rice site built just for the MLTI conference. It will be reset to zero tomorrow at 1:00, and then we’ll begin accumulating grains of rice to address world hunger. This is where you come in! The site is open to all, and your grains of rice will count as long as you start after 1:00 EDT (-4 UCT). The details are below, but the key is to go to: http://MLTI.freerice.com and participate with the 1000 students in Maine as we see how quickly we can raise the rice totals.

The MLTI Student Tech Conference is a wonderful event for Maine students. I hope you will lend a few minutes of your time, and perhaps that of your students, to participate in this one small step to addressing world hunger. – Thanks — Sarah

From Jim Moulton:

(PLEASE NOTE: Though the http://mlti.freerice.com site is now live, rice “earned” via the site in advance of the 1 PM EDT (5 PM GMT) start time for the Conference session will not be “counted.” Once the conference session begins, the site will be re-set, counting of contributions will begin fresh, and the site will remain live until the amount of rice available for donation has been exhausted.)

Maine students and the World Food Programme invite you to join in helping to feed the hungry around the globe via http://mlti.freerice.com

On May 27, 2010 at 1 PM EST (5 PM GMT) during the 7th Annual MLTI Student Conference, students from across Maine will be going to MLTI.freerice.com as a body – working in a wireless environment that has been fine tuned by network technicians of the University of Maine System and Cisco to facilitate 1000 simultaneous connections. But in 2010 purposeful use of social networks has to be a part of taking on any major effort, and so Maine educators are reaching out across their state-wide, national, and worldwide human networks to invite others to join us in donating rice via a customized version of FreeRice.com.

To learn more about the 7th Annual MLTI Student Conference, please head here: http://www.mlti.org/studentconference

To join us in helping to fight world hunger, go here: http://mlti.freerice.com

To help fight hunger in Maine, go to http://www.gsfb.org

To help fight world hunger beyond the conference, head to http://freerice.com

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