News Update!

The Ides of February

Tomorrow is February 15th, which is the deadline for presentation proposals for the Association of Educational Communication and Technology's conference in Anaheim this October. I've presented at this conference for years, and am looking forward to it. Have turned in two proposals. One is on "Learning through Podcasting: Student-Created Podcasts." The other, with my colleague Mark Millard, is "Web 2.0 for Educators: We (and Our Students) are the Web." Hopefully, both will be accepted! Hopefully, you can attend AECT (right next door to Disneyland--Bring the Fam!) and hear what we have to say.

February 15th is also the opening day for presentations to the International Student Media Festival, also in Anaheim in October. As I've mentioned previously, I will be helping out again with the festival. I will be teaching a new class for the ISMF, about podcasting. We will also have a new category, for student-created podcasts. So if your students have or will be creating their own podcasts (or other media type), consider submitting it!

The next episode of "Teach with Tech" is in the planning stages, and I'm eagerly looking forward to the recording session. It will be about technology and special education, something that I haven't dealt with yet in the series. I look forward to finding out more about the state of the art in the area.

Chris

Back from AECT! & Podcasting Screencast

Had a great time at the Association for Educational Communication conference in Dallas, Texas. Met a lot of charming, inteliigent people and saw some old friends. As I suspected, I barely got out of the conference hotel, so I don't have a great sense of what Dallas has to offer, though I did enjoy the Mexican food at RJs on the West End.

At AECT, I presented on the topic of "Podcasting: A New Medium for Distance Learning." It was a packed room and numerous people asked me for a copy of my slides. Better than that, I've created an enhanced podcast or screencast for you, for free download. Just click on the title above. You will probably find that it opens in iTunes, but Quicktime Player should work fine, too. (Actually, I just tried this out, on Windows---for some reason, the slides are almost unreadable in Quicktime, so you will want to use iTunes after all.) I may make this a part of a "Teach with Tech" (Enhanced Podcast) series, along with my HTML tutorial, and make it subscribable. But I don't want to confuse things and upload it along with the regular "Teach with Tech." By the way, I used Profcast to make the screencast and it couldn't have been easier.

Also, while at AECT, I participated in a Skypecast, which is a live broadcast over Skype, in a show called "EdTechTalk Brainstorm." It was a lot of fun, partly because of my co-guest (is that a word?) Jennifer Maddrell, who is an IU grad student in Instructional Systems Technology. We will both be appearing on EdTech Weekly this coming Sunday at 7pm Bloomington time. They should also have an mp3 archive of this past Sunday's session up soon, so check it out. Not that my contributions were all that meaningful, but....

Do you know about the International Student Media Festival? Sponsored by AECT, it is a wonderful opportunity for K-12 students to show off their work, in areas such as still photography, stills with audio, websites, and digital video productions. I assisted as one of the judges this year, and also attended some of the events, such as Marco Torres' inspiring keynote, and the viewing of K-6 projects. I also interviewed some parents and kids, who were very excited about the ISMF. More about this in a future podcast.

More to come....

Chris