The @ONE Project was initially designed with the purpose of making it easier for California Community College faculty and staff to learn about technology that would enhance student learning and success. With this goal in mind, the @ONE Project provides training, online resources and research for free – or at a very low cost (funding is provided by a Telecommunications and Technology Infrastructure Program grant from the Community College Chancellor’s Office). The great news is that you don’t have to work for a California Community College to use these services. These training tools are available to all educators.

Training offerings include:

• Desktop Seminars (presented at lunch)
• Online Courses (led by an instructor)
• Self-paced Training
• In-person Institutes

With the desktop seminars taking very little time and so many training options available for free or generally less than $75, the major barriers to an educator’s learning are removed. This makes @ONE inviting, not only for the educator that seeks to be proactive in their technology training, it also provides an inexpensive option for schools/institutions to effectively train their educators. Quite an attractive option for either party in these economic times.

Because @ONE provides training in such a variety of subjects, from file management to Dreamweaver MX, it may seem a daunting task to decide what classes to take. @ONE works with both educators and administrator’s to help create the most beneficial paths for learning. In addition to having training for a wide variety of subject, @ONE provides courses that aimed to serve varying levels of proficiency. With this flexibility it is easy to see several ways of using @ONE to provide the learning/training for education staff. I hope to bring you more regarding the @ONE Project in a future installment.

There were a few interesting morning and afternoon breakout sessions. It seemed the general theme was authoring tools for teachers. Most of the sessions provided a basic overview of these tools (e.g., Camtasia Relay, podcasting, etc.). A few of the interesting sessions included:

1. Youtube, Itunes, and Google Docs. Save Time and Stimulate– David Sconduto had some good stuff on free Internet resources, including Google Docs., Youtube, and iTunes.
2. Certifying Online Instructors with @One– Patricia James provided an interesting presentation on the @ONE project, which provides courses that prepare faculty to teach effectively using online technology (i.e., LMS technology, etc.).
3. Introducing Teachers-Young and Less Young- to Technology– Rushton Hurley did a good job of discussing how digital tools create wonderful opportunities for powerful learning and professional growth. His focus was on the techniques administrators can use to promote the use of Web 2.0 technology at the primary and secondary levels.

The keynote speaker, Luis von Ahn, delivered a fascinating presentation on his research related to Captcha. The thrust of his academic research is concerned with finding ways to use Captcha technology to do positive things for the world community, such as digitizing books, identifying Internet images, etc.

Although von Ahn didn’t really discuss how this sort of technology or the thinking behind it might affect K-12 education, the presentation really challenged how we as educators think about “down time” or “wasted time.”