TIE Conference 2008

This is my first Technology in Education conference and day one was great. I got here Monday night and got checked in and attended the ‘newbie’ session that night. Tuesday was the first day of the conference and it did not disappoint.

I attended a round table discussion led by Michael Riggs, Systems Engineer or Falcon School District 49. Titled ‘Geek Factor’ I knew I did not want to miss it. It was a group of 12 System Admins and building tech people. This is an area I want to get stronger in. The Informational Technology/Computer Science side. I am just not as knowledgeable in this area as I would like to be. It was great to hear the people in the group discuss issues like, wireless, security, lab images, PDAs, and all kinds of issues related to the technical side.

The first session was really, really good. Led by Bud Hunt, Instructional Technologist of the St.Vrain Valley School District. “Twitter Me This: Presence Tools for Just in Time Learning” It was almost like a mashup presentation. He demonstrated many incredible useful tools. The starting point was his wiki he had a slide show presentation of tools and rational for using web 2.0 tools. We then did a Chatterous ‘back channel’ chat room while the presentation was taking place. Many great jokes, links and observation were presented there adding a whole new layer to the session. It was so refreshing to have another outlet for discussion and sharing rather than listening to a single presenter for 3 hours.

We used twitter and saw examples of how it made Bud a better teacher, we learned how simple Chatterous (transcript here) was to use, and oh yeah did I mention that the whole thing was live blogged and streamed over the interntet  allowing for someone in Texas to play along….using Mogulus. By the end of the session I had my own streaming channel live and broadcasting too. Great stuff Bud!