This week I had the distinct pleasure of visiting Bucks County, PA and do a few presentations. A few? Make that 7 in two days! Between a Day of Discovery for nearly 200 educators, a community night for 80+ parents, and then three high school assemblies, I think I may have met half the county! It was a great time though, and many great conversations arose from it. Jen Dorman was the impetus behind the event, so major thanks go out to her for inviting me into her community and giving me the opportunity to share some of my ideas with the teachers, administrators, parents and students there. OF course, she was more than just a gracious host, she was also one of the presenters on Tuesday as well, along with Matt Monjan and Scott Kinney. The highlight of that day was when an administrator came up to me and said that for the first time, he actually felt empowered to take out his iPhone and use it to explore and make connections during a presentation, WITHOUT feeling like he was being rude or inconsiderate to the presenter. He even signed up for several of the sites we were discussing while we were talking about them!
As promised, here are the presentations that I shared while in Bucks. Very much looking forward to my next visit to the area, whenever that may be.
I’ve been so busy bouncing from one conference to another that blogging has been woefully neglected! However, I’ve got a great new site for you to check out and an incredibly practical reason for sharing it.
I spent the last few days in Missouri presenting three sessions at METC. Of course, I’m never quite satisfied with any presentation I create, so I was tweaking the slides all the way up to the very minute I began presenting. After the presentation, plenty of people asked if I was going to be posting a copy of the presentation online. Normally, I’d use Slideshare to do so, but these presentations made ample use of Powerpoints custom animations. If you don’t over do it, those animations can be great for calling attention to particular details in a slide. Unfortunately, Slideshare doesn’t support those animations at all.
So, after a little searching around I stumbled upon AuthorStream. It supports those animations and handles them rather well. It also supports narratives, like Slideshare does. You can embed presentations, watch them full screen, email them, comment on them all the usually goodies you’d expect. Oh yeah, there’s one more distinct advantage of AuthorStream tho… It has an application that you can download that will convert your powerpoints en masse to flash and then allow you to import them into the AuthorStream website or into WizIQ. So you can embed it into your site, link to a really nifty full window player, or just direct people to their site. And since you can save them offline, no worries about the site disappearing or anything.
SO, here are my presentations from METC! (Click the links to be taken to the AuthorStream page)
Top 10 Free Web 2.0 Sites - This wiki has all the sites and examples that were mentioned during the presentation, as well as sites that have fallen out of the top 10.
I’m not sailor. I tried it once when I was a camper back in the day. I was pretty clueless, and when somebody yelled "Boom coming through!" I stood up to see what they were talking about. *BAM* I swam home.
Saturday though was a completely different experience. I spent the day with with the Wisconsin DEN aboard the s/v Denis Sullivan, the finest sailing vessel I’ve ever seen. Joe has some photos and his own description of events, so visit his Digital Storytelling blog to read all about it.
I loved how interactive the trip was. We weren’t just guests, we were the crew. I recorded a short video with my phone and uploaded it to YouTube. Check out some STAR Discovery Educators raising the main sail!
The fun and games didn’t stop once we got off the boat though. After a break for lunch, we met back at Discovery World (no relation) and learned how to turn our digital photos into a digital story using PhotoStory. That lead us into a demonstration of Discovery Education Science Connection. We watched an interesting video of the Mythbusters as they experimented with toilets and toothbrushes (no, I’m not making that up) and played with some virtual labs.
Afterwards, we journeyed back outside to do a little geocaching along the beautiful Milwaukee shoreline. I’d never done it myself before and I have to admit I had a blast! Our group had to hike over to a kite shop about a mile away to find the cache. It took us a little while, but eventually Joe found it stashed behind the phone booth. Sssshhhhhh!
All in all, it was a great way to spend a day. Sailing, sun, and fun, collaborating geocaching and learning. Kudos to the Wisconsin DEN for putting together such a great event!
Posted on June 11, 2007 in DEN Events by Steve Dembo
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