More Google Tools

I just learned that Google has 2 specialized search engines:

Google Shakespeare - Find and search of Shakespeare's plays; and
Google US Government - Search for information across a large number of U.S. federal, state, and local government sites.

They may be a helpful resource to your teachers and students!

Blogging and Podcasting at NECC 06

Our blog and our podcast pages are now listed on the NECC Website on the Blogging and Podcasting page. I'm excited about the possibility of others finding us and joining in our conversations via comments.

Hitchhikr - Totally Cool!

Now this is really cool! David Warlick has created a site called, Hitchhikr, which is a gathering place for information from conferences. Steve Dembo talks about it on his blog, Teach42 . It's a conference aggregator. You can go to this one site and find all the blogs, podcasts, and photos that people are posting about a conference. Anyone can submitt a conference, add tags, fix erroneous tags, and so on, once you have registered with the site. It's another way to attend a conference without actually going to it.

David Warlick gives a great overview of it on his blog, 2 Cents Worth, Announcing hitchhikr.com , and he also has some information about it on his Connect Learning podcast, Episode 63. If you look through everyone's comments, you'll notice that it's still a little glitchy, but it's brand new and will take a little time to get it running smoothly. And he's counting on the input from the community to help him find ways to improve it as well.

Of course, NECC 2006 is one of the conferences it's watching!

Teaching Educational Games

George Siemens referenced this wiki on Educational Games in his June 17th elearnspace blog. I only just began to explore it and it seems fantastic!

Selections of Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Calligraphy

I received a notice from GlobalSchoolNet about this new web presentation on the Library of Congress website.

"During the late 1920's, early 1930's, and 1990's the Library of Congress acquired a large collection of Arabic script calligraphy sheets. Almost all of the Library's calligraphy sheets came by way of Mr. Kirkor Minassian of New York and Paris. The remaining sheets were acquired by the Library's Field Office in Islamabad, Pakistan, with permission from the Pakistani government.
Calligraphy was a skill to be mastered, and it was used to express religious sentiment and many other aspects of personal and cultural life.
Calligraphic art developed gradually over the centuries, and has been the subject of numerous studies analyzing its role in the faith, culture, and art of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish speaking lands. "

It is interesting and may be something your teachers could utilize in their classes.

Google Sketchup

This has nothing to do with NECC, but I just learned about Google Sketchup. It's an easy to use 3D drawing program that is free from Google. They just now released a Mac version as well.

Here's what Google has to say about it:

Google SketchUp (free) is an easy-to-learn 3D modeling program that enables you to explore the world in 3D. With just a few simple tools, you can create 3D models of houses, sheds, decks, home additions, woodworking projects - even space ships. And once you've built your models, you can place them in Google Earth, post them to the 3D Warehouse, or print hard copies.
Google SketchUp is free for personal use. No registration is required.

Here's a link to some more information on it and some tutorials as well. Learning More About Sketchup

It sounds pretty cool. I think I'll have to play with it in my spare moments this summer.

Spreadsheet of Our Schedules

Ted, thanks again for making that spreadsheet of everyone's schedule. That was such a good idea. It is so helpful to see what each of us is planning to go to. That's a great conference tip for teams of people going together to a conference as big as NECC.

Alternatives to NECC Concurrent Sessions

Hi All! In planning my NECC conference schedule and looking at the spread sheet, I just wanted to point out that in addition to the concurrent sessions there are Research Paper Lectures & Round Tables that are happening too. Nevermind the Poster Sessions and Student Showcases!

In addition to all of that - several videoconference content providers show previews of their content. Many of these are usually $50-$100 to preview, so it is a good chance to check those out too. They all appear to be in SDCC 24C and they are on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and seem to start on the hour. I am going to try and see as many as I can so I can preview new IVC options for us next year - but don't hesitate to check it out as well!

I am getting so excited!

Conference Hints and Tips

Here's an oldie but a goody that I published last year but decided to repost in case this would help anyone.

This is a great idea I picked up from other conference attendees and this is useful no matter what conference you are attending. There are usually LOTS of vendor booths where you can enter a drawing, get a free gift, or leave information for future contacts and so on. It can be a real pain to stand there and fill out forms.

INSTEAD - Make labels ahead of time with your contact info on it and then you can just slap it on the vendor's form and you're good to go. I just took my business card (which I make and print myself anyway) and adapted it to fit onto a 1 1/3" x 4" label and printed several sheets. I also printed up some regular business cards to take along as well.

Above is a sample label. I used Avery 8162 Address Labels. For the sample screen shot above, I changed the phone numbers and e-mail address to "protect the innocent."

Blogging and Podcasting from NECC

Donna, Michael and I plan to blog and to podcast from NECC. I think we will be using this blog for things that are pure text blogs. We will be using a different site to post podcasts with audio, maybe some video, and some images.

The podcast site is still under development. Here's a link to the site:
Adventures in Educational Podcasting. This is my main site. On that page you'll find a link to my school podcasts as well as to our NECC 2006 Podcasts page.

We'd love to have everyone contribute comments and ideas to all of these things. If you are going to NECC, please join us for podcasting. We plan to meet at the end of each day and share about whatever "knocked our socks off" that day. We'll put links and such in the show notes for each podcast.

If you aren't attending NECC, it will be a great way for you to join in the learning if you listen, read, and post comments. We are hoping that this will be a great way to collaborate and to keep the learning going.

Also, I've submitted our blog site and our podcasting site to NECC for inclusion on the NECC web site. We are promised that sometime before the conference the links will be up on the web.

NECC 2006 Planning

In making my plans for NECC, I realized I have a couple of topics that I want to focus on and then I was thinking we all probably do. Maybe instead of trying to go to a variety of subjects we could each focus on one or two and then share information.

I am interested in videoconferencing and I would like to see some of the previews from content providers and they are almost all scheduled at the same time as concurrent sessions. I also want to focus on online learning and blended learning. My other interests are knowledge management and mobile learning.

I am attending 2 workshops -
Thursday Morning: Designing Effective Projects: Creating Curriculum for Engaged Learning.
Friday Afternoon: Planning and Delivering Online Instruction to Engage Learners: Practical Suggestions

I am planning to attend DeWitt Jones, but I cannot attend the One-to-One Computing keynote because I will be at a workshop. I hope other will plan to go because that is a very interesting topic!

One thing I noticed is that all of the Birds-of-a-Feather are scheduled together. There is a videoconferencing group and since I belong to that SIG I will probably attend that - although I am extremely interested in the Web 2.0: Effects and Potential; How Do We Build 21st Century Skills?; and Games and Simulations BOAF groups.

I am interested in finding out others' focus and what they will be attending so we can make sure we gather all the information we want and need!