Digital Passports

Today I feel pretty darn privileged because I get to spend the day networking at TechForum Midwest, which just happens to be local for me No flight required!

Highlight of the day has been the networking taking place. Sheryl Nussbaum Beach set the right tone with her opening keynote, encouraging the attendees to spend time today building out their own personal learning networks. And without a question, people have been taking it to heart. Tweet’s have been flying all over, sessions are being uStreamed and recorded for podcasts, and the networking has truly been exemplary. Of course, there are about half a dozen STAR Discovery Educators or so around, who are leading by example!

As promised, here is a link to my afternoon presentation dealing with AUP’s, Social Networking and Internet Safety. It’s a messy topic to be sure, but we had a great discussion and there seemed to be many lightbulbs switching on above people’s heads.

Great stuff, and I was glad just to be a part of it.

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)

Your Passport to Educational Blogging

Dynamic Professional Development using RSS

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.

Now that I’ve been with Discovery for a year, it looks like I finally merit my own blog!

Well, maybe that’s not it exactly.  As we restructure things a little for the new year, we’re shifting the focus around a little.  I’ll still be posting on the National blog, but mostly it will be about DEN specific events and opportunities. I’m pretty lucky though, in that part of my job is to keep an eye out for new tools and technologies and figure out how they fit into the world of education.  Posts related to that part of the job are going to be placed here, on the Digital Passports blog.

Onwards to the obvious question.  Why Digital Passports?  There’s a few reasons.  The first is that I thought I’d get sued if I used "Chicken Soup for the Digital Immigrant’s Soul".  So that name was out.  While trying to figure out a decent name, I talked quite a bit with Hall Davidson (who’s now posting on his own blog, Media Matters).  As we brainstormed, we kept keying in on the idea that whether you’re a so called Native or Immigrant is really irrelevant at this point.  What matters is how willing you are to travel.

I know plenty of DEN members that did not grow up with the internet.  They didn’t have a cell phone during their teenage years because they hadn’t been invented yet!  High tech at the time may have been a computer that was the size of a house.  In short, they’re the typical Digital Immigrant.

However, that hasn’t stopped them.  They go to every conference they can.  They read blogs and listen to podcasts.  They boldly go where no teacher in their district has ever gone before (to places like MySpace and Facebook).  In short, despite the fact that it’s a brave new world, they make the effort to immerse themselves in a culture that’s radically different than the one they experienced growing up.  They have issued themselves a Digital Passport and are filling it with stamps that say things like ‘Flickr’, ‘Blogger’, and ‘del.icio.us’. 

The people they encounter in these places act differently (they share EVERYTHING), they talk differently (g2g PRW.  LOL.  ttyl ), they  spell differently (goodbye silent ‘e’), and they even look different (browse MySpace for endless examples).  However, that hasn’t stopped many teachers from diving right in to DSL (Digital as a Second Language).

So this blog is going to be for teachers who already have a Digital Passport or are interested in applying for one.  I’ll be sharing new technologies and websites, along with some old favorites with new twists.  I hope that you share things that you find as you journey along the Information Superhighway (I still love that phrase), so that we can all learn together as a community.

Make sure you’ve got some comfortable shoes on, because there’s quite a bit of climbing to do.  Oh yeah, and don’t forget your towel.  Let’s explore!