Monday, June 30, 2003 at NECC
I find Seattle to be a fascinating city. Everywhere you go there are crowds of people, all with busy agendas going here and there. I even found a Barnes & Noble right around the corner from the convention center. Seattle’s a friendly place and I hope to get back here when I have lots more time! Speaking of time, I haven’t even had time to catch my breath. I have been blogging, but second-hand all day yesterday helping these great Georgia educators. Yesterday we had a station set up at the convention center and all the grant participants came there and began the process of blogging all they are learning. It’s fun to read what they write and take a different perspective of all that’s going on.
So, I’m up early trying to catch up cause I promised Pam I would keep in touch with all of you who did not get to come to NECC this year. I truly wish that Joe, Pam, Pat, Sarah, Terry and everyone else were here. That would have been fantastic but you all have been in our thoughts and your ears should have burned last night because we were saying good things about all of you and what you are doing. The EduBloggers meeting at the Rennaissance capped the day. I can hardly express how it feels to meet people face-to-face whom you have been collaborating with all year. Meeting Will and Tim was great. I also met a lot of the people who work with Tim and got to know him yet again in another way. Also, I met Susie Boss from Intel. She’s the one who wrote the stories about blogging on Intel’s Innovation Odyssey. Ohhhhh, to have her writing skills! I enjoyed every minute talking with her and meeting more of the Intel crew. They are a dynamic group and doing so many good things to focus on education and educators. Talking to Thor from Clarity Innovations was really uplifting. His company’s mission and vision gives me hope for the future.. It amazes me how the community continues to grow. Last night was a mixture of people and it was great to talk and learn from all of them. Tim asked Will, Tim, and myself to talk about what we had done this year. The audience was most interested and asked great questions. I think perhaps the toughest thing to explain was just what exactly is a weblog. Defining it is so hard but I’ve decided that’s really a good thing. It is a bag full of possiblilities and you can make it be whatever you want it to be. It will not be pigeon-holed. I don’t think you can really appreciate that until you get knee-deep in it. Tim really put together a great evening. Just listening to his teachers talk about him lets me see what a change agent he is for education.. Thanks Tim for a great get-together! Of course, meeting Will was most special. It’s a strange feeling meeting someone whom you feel you already know and the best part is liking him as much off-line as on-line. What fun!
I am going to include the sessions I have gotten to as stories that you can read if you choose. They will be just my typed notes as I was listening to the presenter. I try to write as much as I can but do tend to use my own shorthand and punctuation gets put to the side. I hope they make sense but just email me if you have questions.
Open Source
ESL
Higher Order Thinking Skills
I’m finding it hard to squeeze in the time to do all I want to do . but my main focus is on the Georgia team we brought up here. Be sure to read their posts at GeorgiaNECC2003Notes.
I’m writing this Tuesday AM. I had hoped to get this out early but I was back helping the Georgia NECC team - what a hard-working, fantastic group we have here! I’ll try to post more later…..
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