I am slowly settling back in at home/school after two amazing days at FETC last week. I wish I could attend a conference like this every month:

• to learn new things
• hear speakers that are going towards the same direction I have chosen for my professional path.
• attend presentation that validate the endless hours of work I am putting in after I physically leave my classroom
• to get pumped up about these exciting times we are living in regards to technologies and the possibilities they open up

Starting with NECC 2006, which I was not able to attend, but nevertheless learned a lot from , thanks to the kind people who chose to record workshops and make them available as podcasts or shared their experiences through their blog. Even after more than six months I am able to learn from these sessions.

The next amazing experience was the K-12 Online Conference, where I not only participated as a presenter, but also as an attendee. I am still enjoying reading the ongoing conversation of people discussing presentations and referring to the pod-and vidcasts uploaded by the presenters. I feel that I am especially benefiting from reading other people’s blogs and reading their notes and exploring further the links that they included to extend the the point the presenter was trying to get across. I guess that could have been one of the meanings of the phrase: “spinning a web”.

When I heard that there was going to be free wireless access throughout the conference center at FETC in Orlando, I knew that I wanted to try to blog ALL the sessions that I was going to attend. My first thought was that it was the perfect way to take notes. No chance of loosing them, keep them organized and immediately accessible. Our school requires faculty who goes to a conference to give a brief presentation about the conference, the sessions that were attended and talk a little bit about what we have learned and how the school could benefit from that. My presentation for our faculty was already done and completed before I ever returned from the conference. My blog will be the perfect presentation tool…

As a second, almost unexpected, benefit of blogging during the sessions was the deep satisfaction I got out of looking up and linking to the sites the presenters were talking about. Since that happened almost simultaneously, the added “spice” to the presentation was incredible.

Alan November spoke about the necessity of teachers having to start thinking globally and including other countries and cultures’ point of view in their class discussion. He explained how to use Alta Vista Worldwide Search function, including the”host:uk” for searches limited to sites originating in the United Kingdom. It was great to immediately being able to try that out. I feel that because of the immediate “hands-on” verification of what I had heard I am more likely to incorporate this “little” trick in my search repertoire.
Here are some more country Internet domains:

• .za — South Africa
• .ar — Argentina
• .de– Germany
• .tr– Turkey
• .es– Spain
• .cn– China

Back in November 2006, Vicki Davis made an all call to bloggers in her post “If you’re going to NECC and you are a blogger — we need you!“.

I’d like to bring you in on a “little” discussion that we’ve been having behind the scenes about the potential for an edubloggerCon just prior to the NECC conference in Atlanta in June of 2007.

And if you are not going to attend NECC 2007 in Atlanta:

And if you’re NOT going to NECC, I’d love to organize a group who will be “attending” virtually so that you can glean information off of the conference — there are just so many links, it helps to have outside observers going through the blogs. (Additionally, we could use podcast volunteer editors for those shooting audio interviews at the conference to post them quickly.) Either way, we can and should model effective blogging and collaboration with this process and there is room for everyone!

Here are some of the things I would like to see bloggers who are going to share with non-attendees to include:

• Notes of sessions attended with links to handouts, PowerPoints, examples, etc.
• Easy way to access and download Pod- and Vidcasts through RSS feed (similar to the K-12 Online Conference feed) and individual links to .mp3 and .mp4 files.
• Possibly an open Skype Channel directly into the conference presentation, so non-attendees can still listen in live.
• Photos of products and examples discussed

[tag] necc, necc06, fetc, fetc07[/tag]

Posted: 30. January, 2007 at 10:05 pm. Filed under: Uncategorized.
Comment | Trackback