National Educational Computing Conference (NECC)

Saturday, June 27: My first day at NECC in Washington, D.C. It is a pre-conference day when most activities consist of fee-based workshop. However, there is so much to do to take advantage of the thousands of offerings at this giant conference! After I registered and collected my packet of conference materials, found a quiet corner, and began using the NECC Planner to organize myself. It's a little more difficult this year because the Bring Your Own Laptop events (my favorites because they are all hands-on!) now require pre-registration, intended to thwart over-attendance by enthusiastic participants. Once I decide which BYOL events fit into my schedule, I must visit the nice lady in the booth and request a ticket for that session. Then, I'll send my conference planner to my iPhone calendar and voila! I'll know where I need to be for the next four days.

Also, you can join us through live videofeed if you have time.

The Playground: Etherpad

As promised, I will be sharing with you ideas and applications as I see them, and here is the first: Etherpad. This is a free Web 2.0 application that allows users to participate in real-time collaborative editing--seriously! A chat window can be opened, allowing editors to "talk" about the editing process, and the changes made by each participant appear in colored text. This is the functionality that Google is attempting in Google Wave (which is not yet ready for release)--Etherpad has it NOW!

Please play with this application with a friend or two, and let me know what you think. Can we use this application to help our students learn important curriculum concepts? How? Let’s share some ideas here to begin building our plans for the new school year.

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