My 2007 in Review - Part 2

June signaled not only the end of the school year but the start of some of the most amazing learning opportunities I have ever had. I was lucky enough to present at NECC 2007 in Atlanta. NECC of course was a very educational experience but by far my 2 best experiences came from Networking at NECC. The first was a pre-conf event with the DEN. On the bus ride over I finally got to meet one of my favorite people from SL in RL, Jen from WOW. We were introducing ourselves to everyone on the bus and when I heard her name, I started shouting it's me, JessieMarie! It was very funny. We didn't get a lot of time to hang out because there was so much learning to focus on. We were learning the finer points of green screening from the folks at Discovery. The learning that took place was important but the connections that were made were invaluable. The second experience was presenting a poster session. I was actually almost insulted when NECC "busted" me down from a concurrent session to a poster. I almost turned them down, but then good sense prevailed and I went ahead with it. I had almost 150 people come through my poster session and I presented nonstop for 2 hours. I ran out of business cards and nearly lost my voice. It was an amazing experience. When they asked me this year to do a poster session, I graciously accepted without a second thought.

In July, I was invited to an experience that would enrich my education far beyond my imagination. I was invited on the DEN Academic Excursion to the Bahamas. Imagine being trapped on a boat with 50 of the most innovative tech educators in the country for 4 days. Close your eyes and see Joe Brennan, Hall Davidson and Steve Dembo sitting at your table and giving advice on your quandries, laughing at your jokes, and in general enjoying your company. The group on the excursion started out as strangers but ended up as family. I was introduced to so many amazing tools, sites, projects and programs on this trip that it would take another blog entry to detail them all. However, the one tool that immediately became a daily use for me was Twitter. I never understood Twitter, it seemed, well "stupid" to me. Why on earth would I stop my day and go to a website to tell people what I was doing. My Twitter affair began in the airport, my flight was delayed by 2 hours so I bought internet and decided to give Twitter a try. Many of the people from the cruise had raved about Twitter. I just didn't get it. I set up an account and that's when the magic began. As I sat there in the airport, one by one the majority of people from the cruise created accounts. We were now able to stay in touch and share the amazing things we were doing. I actually found others in the airport who were also waiting for delayed flights through Twitter! It was so wild. My Twitterlove has continued since. Twitter has become as important as my email. I can get immediate feedback and I learn about new tools everyday from my TwitterFriends. The friendships I made on the cruise have continued in the real world due in part to Twitter. I am thankful everyday for each of you, you know who you are! (wink)

August brought Animoto into my life. Animoto is a video mixer program that digitally mixes up your photos with music and special effects. The free account lets you make 30 second clips with 15 photos, however that wasn't enough for me. I paid the $30 for the whole enchilada for a year. I wanted to make longer videos with more pictures.

September was the discovery of Voicethread. VoiceThread is am amazing tool that lets you upload images and then record messages either audio or text for each image. People have used it to narrate powerpoints and other types of presentations. The neat thing is that multiple people can record info for one image. We did this to try and describe our DEN academic excursion.

Thanks for sharing in part 2 of my excellent academic adventure! Stay tuned for part 3!

~Anne

My 2007 in Review - Part 1

2007 has been a whirlwind year for me. My learning journey has never moved so rapidly. My job title changed from Tech Facilitator for Differentiated Learning to Instructional Technology Specialist and my job responsibilities changed from being team focused to whole district. Our district is in the process of writing a curriculum. We have never had one before so this has been a huge paradigm shift. We also now have a new tech director who has a vision of our future that is very exciting to me, hopefully his progress won't be slowed down by bureaucratic red tape. I believe that between our curriculum director, leads, new tech director, tech savy superintendent and myself that we are finally heading in the right direction technology wise. It's a very dynamic time to be in education and I think we are finally going to start participating in it instead of just standing on the sidelines saying our kids can't do this, our teachers can't do this, our administrators can't do this....etc.

There are so many new things I was introduced to this year. Therefore this blog entry will be broken into three 4 month segments. I hope you will join me on what was a most excellent adventure.

In January new to me was the "buzz" about Web 2.0 tools. I had heard the term bantered about in conversation but I didn't truly understand what it was all about. I started to investigate, this sounded important.

One of the tools that I discovered early in the year (Feb) was Skrbl. Skrbl is an easy to use collaborative whiteboard. It's a great way to collaborate with people in other locations. I used it in several presentations I did to get people to participate in projects anonymously. No one knew who was doing the editing just that it was someone in our group unless they wanted to be identified.
Moving into March I discovered PhotoBucket which has become a place that I do a lot of image editing, hosting and resizing. There are many new tools here that I haven't had time to play with because of all the "new" sites that keep popping up in my learning.

April led me to the most time consuming and yet rewarding find of all. Second Life. Second Life is a virtual world created entirely by the users. It is a constantly changing environment with a plethora of possibilities for education. I am only a part of the Main Grid, but I know there are amazing things happening on the Teen Grid in schools now. This discovery also led me to becoming a part of an amazing team, the Discovery Education Network in SL Leadership Council. I am the Co-Chair of the building team. In world I am JessieMarie Flanagan known as JM. The DEN-SL offers FREE teacher workshops in world every Wed night. We also host a variety of events throughout the year. If you are interested in checking out SL let me know and I would be happy to hold your hand while navigating through this immense amazing place.

In May, Will Richardson ignited my love of blogging and I learned to use an aggregator.
My choice is Google Reader because it links into my iGoogle which shows up as my home page with all my links to other gadgets and gizmos...well you get the picture. I started this blog the day I took the workshop from Will Richardson, but then I failed to keep up with it. Partially because I spend so much time reading blogs and commenting on them from my Google Reader and partially because I "forgot" about it.

One of my goals for this year is to start writing more regularly and try to build up some readership. This will be tough for me as I feel like everyone else has already said what I wanted to but just didn't know how. I get stuck on what topics will strike a cord with people and get them talking. I want to be a part of the conversation not just a listener on the sidelines.

Please join me later in the week for part 2 of my excellent adventure. : )

~Anne

Mac vs PC - Dead argument

I can't believe how time flies, is it really already Dec 2nd?! My Black Friday crazy shopping is now behind me and I am ready for the holiday craziness to begin. My family celebrates both Hanukkah and Christmas which makes the holiday time even more stressful. My only saving grace this year is that Hanukkah is so early that our "events" don't overlap.

While wading my way through my stack of RSS feeds which seems to grow daily, I found this video on YouTube, I think it was on CoolCatTeachers blog, if not I apologize, I am getting old.
Anyway, I have truly enjoyed the Mac Vs PC arguments I have had with many of my male friends. I am a loyal Mac user and always have been since Apple IIe. What I enjoy most is now listening to them bellyache how they want a Mac for the holidays! My how the tide has turned!

Learning a new skill and getting sidetracked

I am currently trying to learn how to personalize my blogger. I thought I would start with something simple adding a photo to my profile. Only to find this wasn't as simple as I wanted it to be. I finally figured it out but it led me a on a merry chase until I figured it out.

I used to use Photobucket for uploading images to a discussion board I belong to. It has been a very long time since I used Photobucket, I still have my account and miracles of all miracle I still remembered my password and log in info. Photobucket has completely changed since my last use. It is still very simple to use, but now there are many more bells and whistles then before. One of the things that I got caught up in making were Meez.

Meez are avatars that you create and then Photobucket saves them in 7 different sizes for you. It was like playing with dolls for adults. I got to choose all of the features, clothing, jewelry, animation, backgrounds and create my own little Meez. Signing up was free and I got 25 free coinz to use. There are plenty of free options but since my taste has always run on the expensive side I chose to sign up. I saved all of the free items I liked to my closet and purchased the few items that I wanted to buy. Now I have several Meez laying around photo bucket that I can use when I want for different things.

I got sidetracked by playing with the Meez for a good hour, but now I am back on track trying to figure out how to personalize my blogspot. Happy Thanksgiving to Everyone!! Enjoy this time with family and friends and don't forget to give thanks for all that you have received in the last year.

~Anne

Procrastination and Memory Loss

I had every intention of keeping up my blog. I had a nice opening post, a pretty good title and lots of ideas, but then long term memory loss hit and I totally forgot about this blog! Actually I can time it to the exact time that I developed my Second Life avatar, JessieMarie Flanagan, SL has a HUGE learning curve and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Within a few months I became completely submerged in trying to learn a whole new way of life. I also became an active member of ISTE-SL and a member of the DEN-SL Leadership Council. Around this time I also discovered Google Groups. The time period between April - August was a whirlwind of activity for me.

In April I had the workshop that I blogged about previously. This sent me off on the aggregator and SL trail. I then attended NECC and the DEN Academic Excursion which sent me off into the Twitterverse. Once I got back from all of these amazing experiences I had to start getting ready for a rocky start to a new school year.

I work for a special education co-op and we are in the process of writing curriculum. I did not say re-writing because we have NEVER had a curriculum before. This has led to all sorts of a-ha moments and headaches. We have faced some difficult challenges but also we have encountered some real successes.

Just recently I have had time to think about starting my own blog. My Mother who has been out of tech for a long time has just made a commitment to jump back in with both feet. I loaned her my Will Richardson book and she is a convert! As soon as I heard about her plan to start 2 blogs, I realized that I better get a move on or she might pass me up.

I can't wait to start sharing all of the cool tools that I have learned about in the last year or so from my feeds, IMs, Twits, and conferences. Please join me on what I am sure will be an exciting journey from here to wherever the wind will take me.

Fabulous Workshop!

I am sitting here in the most wonderful workshop, "Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts" by Will Richardson. I am so excited to have my thoughts validated by the echoes of his presentation. I truly believe that we need to change the way we teach children. The digital children of this world need to be fully engaged in their own learning. We can engage them through discovery and exploration in a way that traditional schooling can't. I realize that we have a long way to go, but I am so happy to be connecting with other educators who share my views.
There are several tools that I will be adding to my arsenal thanks to this great workshop: PageFlakes is one that I have never used before and can't wait to try. I am becoming more adept at Del.icio.us and tagging and I learned several ways to use an aggregator that I was not already familiar with. This has been a extremely valuable learning experience and yet another step in my journey to stay on the "bleeding edge of technology"