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