This year the Region 16 ESC Instructional Technology team (Debbie, Jennifer, and Heather) along with Mindy, our Career and Technology consultant who attended with us this year, created a wiki to record our experiences at the 2008 TCEA conference. Each of us attended separate sessions and updated our own individual pages on the wiki. Rather than double-post, here is a link to the wiki: http://esc16weblearning5.pbwiki.com/.

Here I am, back at TCEA one year after creating this, my first blog, and there are only 6 (this makes 7) posts. What can I say…I have no excuse. I was so fired up when I created this that I was SURE I’d be making weekly, if not daily, contributions to the blogosphere, but I guess real life got in the way.

That’s not to say that I haven’t learned a LOT from and about blogging in the past year. I have become a blog-lurking junky. I have subscribed to several educational blogs that I read religiously. In fact, I use Bloglines to subscribe to my favorites, and I installed the Bloglines Notifier so I can read them as soon as their authors update them!

This has been an amazing year in the advance of technology in education…or at least I’m more aware of the advances. Social bookmark sites such as del.icio.us have changed the way we share resources; flickr has changed the way we share photos; wikis such as pbwiki have changed the way we collaborate; not to mention video sharing and podcasting! Wow!

Some days I feel like a sponge, just soaking up as much knowledge as I can. Other days, I feel like the sponge is saturated. But every day, I am amazed by the huge community of teachers and learners, adults and children, who are taking part in this vast world which has become known by some as Web 2.0.

So, here I am, back at TCEA a year later, making a new commitment to be more than a lurker; to become a contributor. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m sitting in Five Easy Steps to District-wide Blogging Tools, presented by Miguel Guhlin and teachers from San Antonio ISD showing examples of student blogging. This is so exciting, and I can hardly wait to go back and share with the teachers of Region 16.

Miguel brought teachers with him who already have classroom blogs in place to show real examples. The first example is of Paul Gates’ Second Grade class at Madison Elementary in San Antonio. According to Paul kids are asking to write during free time so they can work on their blogs!!

The campus instructional technologists also shared their experiences with blogging at each of their campuses, and one idea is the use of poems and creating diagrams using Kidspiration which are posted with the blog. Students enjoy reading and commenting on each other’s work as well as writing their own blogs.

The district is experimenting with various platforms, working slowly to make blogging an effective tool. Right now WordPress and b2Evolution are the two that have risen to the top for San Antonio ISD.

Right now, the blogging is at the K-8 level, but the team is in the process of finding the best combination of safety and rights management to include grades 9-12.

Now we’re getting ready to start on the technical side of setting up a blog, and I am going to close so I can really pay close attention.

The Swish workshop I facilitated this morning was great. Swish is a program which creates .swf (Flash) animation files, and it is so much easier to use than Flash! Also, their education discount is unbelievable…80% off the retail price!
It’s been awhile since I used Swish, and I had forgotten how user friendly and powerful it is. I’m going to have to practice lots more in preparation for the workshop I’m teaching next month.

I’m posting my first entry in this blog using my Palm Treo 650. If you are reading this, it worked!

Last evening I facilitated a workshop called The Producers: Springtime for Microsoft Producer presented by Dr. Lane Hunnicutt of Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, and it was well worth the time.
I’m so excited about finally learning how to use Microsoft Producer! It’s one of those programs I’ve known existed for years, but haven’t taken time to play with or learn. I even had it installed on my computer already. It is very easy to use, and I think it is exactly what some of our consultants will want to use in conjunction with Blackboard at Region 16 ESC.

Producer integrates with Powerpoint to allow audio as well as video to Powerpoint slides. It’s going to be a great tool for enhancing online instruction.