It is less than two weeks before the North Carolina Educational Technology Conference, my state’s largest edtech conference of the year. This conference is unique in that the planning, organization, and management of the conference are not operated by an association, but by a group of educators, who years ago, saw a need for a large state conference, when the state department of education was struggling with severe budget cuts.
There is also an ISTE affiliate managed conference in the Spring, maintained by NCAECT, but our November event is the largest, perhaps one of the largest in the nation.
I’m especially excited about this conference because they have arranged to have Angus King as the opening keynote speaker. King, the former governor of Maine, was instrumental in accomplishing that state’s 1:1 laptop initiative. I’ve heard him before, and King does a masterful job of weaving together not only his experiences in public service, but also what he has seen and learned during travels within the classrooms of Maine, and the nations of the world. His message is especially compelling in that he says that we have only a matter of months to turn our classrooms around to more 21st century relevant operations.
Also speaking at the conference will be Dr. Therese Crane, of Infotech Strategies (I don’t know her), Bernajean Porter of BJP Consulting (I’ve met Bernajean, but have not heard her speak), and Dr. Lee Whitmore of SoundTree (I do not know him).
For the last few hours, I have been building a web page for the conference with instructions for creating a weblog and for tagging blog entries and flickr photos, so that we can aggregate these conversations into one spot. Last year, I built a simple blogging engine for conference attendees to use to blog the conference, but am de-emphasizing that tool this year, since it is so easy to set up a blog for yourself using Blogger. Plus, I didn’t know what RSS was a year ago.
So, for those of you in NC, VA, or SC who plan to attend the NCETC confernece, and especially those who will be presenting at the conference and would like to provide a preview of what’s to be covered, place the following HTML code within the body of your blog articles:
Dave
If possible could you please podcast King’s keynote? I love listening to him – he gets me excited to be teaching. Thanks.
Eric Langhorst
Was it only a year ago? Yes, I attended your NCETC session on blogging and another by a blogging English teacher from the western part of the state. Went home and made my maiden Web 2.0 voyage, a photoblog about my family’s Christmas. Began blogvangelism in my school system in the spring and had you come down here to the coast for three days in the early fall. In less than a year, our school system’s blogroll has grown to nearly 20 active professional and class blogs. (I’m soon going to count the actual numbers of Blogmeister students and the actual number of their posts. Just another compelling “numbers” story.) Such a rapid rate of diffusion and adoption says much about the future of read/write web technologies in teaching and learning…