The keynote below was published this morning and provided a great way to start the week.

Resources from the keynote are on the conference wiki.

Link to keynote.

Spread the word with teachers at your school by sharing the online flyer

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I just added a new rss feed to my “all in one place” place.

It was one of those, why didn’t I do this sooner, slap head moments.

I got the idea after a brief exchange in a chatroom between Jackie Gerstein and Joyce Valenza on liveclass2.0 on Saturday. The topic of the day was diigo. Jackie mentioned how she often starts her morning in Diigo checking out the links that have been added to the groups she belongs to. Joyce replied that she does that too. I always learn something in the liveclass20 sessions. While I was in the online seminar to learn about Diigo, as usual, the experience sparked a completely random idea that could not have been predicted.

After the exchange, I’m thinking, hey, I have a whole network in delicious (a kind of PLN subgroup that has been neglected), I bet if I checked their additions everyday it would be useful and informative and would make me smarter. I like the idea of all these great educators saving their resources and me taking advantage of that, collaborating.

This is another node in the flow of information from my personal learning network. One that I have not been utilizing enough.

I can stay on top of my network the laborious way, by going to the delicious site, logging in and checking network…

OR

“I bet they have an rss feed for that” and I can add it to my “all in one place” place. So when I go to that place everyday it will be there, updated.

How to, with Pics

Go to delicious and click on your network

As you can see there are 102,000 bookmarks saved by educators in my network

Scroll down to the lower portion of the page, and you will see the RSS feed link

After you click on it you will get a url that looks something like this

feed://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/network/lindseybarlow?count=15

I actually edited the field and changed the count=15 to count=35, this will make the feed bring in the latest 35 bookmarks from my network. If it is an active day or I miss a few days, then I will miss some of the bookmarks. This is not a big deal, I mostly just scan through the titles and investigate those that look the most interesting. Often a bookmark will appear more than once as the educators in my network have similar interests they tend to bookmark similar sites, especially ones that are shared via twitter. As you can see in the screenshot from the top, netvibes (my all in one place place) conveniently shows who bookmarked the site and its title. Scanning is a snap with this set up and doesn’t add much time to my daily check on what is happening.

Extra Credit

If you don’t have much of a network

If you don’t have much of a network in delicious, don’t worry. There is a shortcut. You can still take advantage of this idea, by tapping into the stream of someone who does have a good network. Replace the lindseybarlow in the above feed url with the delicious name of anyone with an account and you will have created a feed to anyone’s network.

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Massachusetts Computer using educators annual conference takes place this week. To have one place to monitor, listen and watch what is going on I created a public page on netvibes that monitors the tags masscue and masscue09.

As soon as actual attendees post online via twitter, flickr, delicious, diigo, and blogs, it will feed to this page, making it easier to connect and listen to what is going on in sessions. I get so much more out of a conference this way, I lose that anxiety about choosing one session from the many great sessions on offer. I know that I can go back and check out links and bookmarks from most of the sessions, if and when I have time.

You can create a similar page for any conference, you may or may not be going to (just change the tag). The same ideas could work in the classroom, it would be just as easy to set up a page to follow any “tag” that is related to your curriculum topic. For collaboration and teamwork make your own tag & have the group post resources which are then aggregated automatically on the page.

Twitter search widget

This widget feeds every tweet that includes the word “masscue”. Helpful to connect to others on twitter and expand your personal learning network.

In the netvibes Add Content section choose twitter search from the essential widgets list.

Delicious and Diigo RSS feeds

To stay on top of what attendees are bookmarking in sessions, go to delicious and search for the tag you want to include. On the page with the search results you will see an rss icon. Click on that and copy the feed address (url). It will look something like this

feed://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/masscue?count=15

In netvibes, go to add content click add a feed, then paste in this url.

Blog Search

This widget will find all blog posts about a specific topic entered into the search. Add this content to your page using the blog search widget

Photos & media

To follow photo posts and other media being archived and tagged at the event, similar feed widgets can be created using

• flickr & rss,
• youtube & rss,
• slideshare & rss

If I was organizing an event, this would be job one, job two would be publicizing it. So, whether you travel to attend a conference in person or crash it via a netvibes page, share what you create & learn so others can follow you there, virtually of course.

Another blogpost with similar focus:

Create a listening dashboard for your organization

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I was reading this brave post by Lisa Thumann “I just don’t like technology” about how to deal with a comment from a professional development participant that really threw off her whole presentation. Great title, about a teacher expressing her fears, her needs about technology. It was not about Lisa, or her activities for the day, although the fallout impacted everyone in the session. Anyone who has delivered professional development to teachers has at some time or another run into a few with this set-in-stone attitude.
After reading the comments, it stayed in my mind, wondering what I would do in that situation, what would the answer be?

Sunday rolls around and another post by Buffy J Hamilton on the unquiet librarian about digital literacy and reading e-books.
Short Stories + iPods= Happy Readers « The Unquiet Librarian
Buffy has a great photo showing one student reading a book and another reading on her ipod. Both can co-exist-of course..and then
in the last paragraph short and succinct, but so true.

“The kids know this—what part of this don’t the adults get? At the end of the day, our focus needs to be about meeting their needs, not ours.”

That was the answer that I was looking for, for the teacher that “just doesn’t like technology”. It’s not about you teacher….it’s about meeting the needs of your students.

It was quite the librarian weekend this weekend for me (and 80 others online). I spent time in the classroom 2.0 session with joyce valenza and buffy j hamilton learning about copyright and creative commons in the library. Archive here.

THEN the final piece of the puzzle was delivered. Joyce Valenza also wrote in School Library Journal about how to retool yourself, a roadmap for teachers to start to learn more, take control of their own professional development and start to remove their own blocks that prevent them from meeting the needs of their students. As teachers become more in control of their own learning, their resistance will drop away as they meet their own needs more easily and can tune it to the needs of their students. The learning network that I am immersed in is made up of most of the aspects mentioned in this article and will form part of a graduate course I am teaching on developing a personal learning network for professional and classroom use next February.

Ta da! PLN works for me, really. On it’s own.

(PLN=personal learning network)

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Watching my twitter feed and email account, I have been saving up these notices about free upcoming online professional development and I am excited by how my calendar is so full of great opportunities to learn.

I thought it would be useful to consolidate them into one post and share it out. This is low-hanging fruit people! It offers an easy way to get other teachers in your school involved. No travel, just internet and a little time. Often these webinars are archived so even if you are not available at the time advertised you can watch later.

Spread the Word!

• Send this link to your administrators so they can share it with staff
• Organize a viewing in your classroom. This could be a live viewing or a showing of an archived show.
  • Invite colleagues, use the digital projector and watch in a group.
  • This is a comfortable way to introduce staff to the idea,
  • Followup with idea sharing.

Upcoming Webinars and Events

October 6th STEM webinar from Discovery http://is.gd/3SawZ includes demo on how to use digital media on http://www.fuelourfuturenow…

October 6th Google Apps Education Edition at Maine Township High School District from @Henrythiele blog at http://bit.ly/4n1ELb

October 7th at 4pm(Eastern). Learn about C-Span Classroom’s outstanding free resources for social studies educators. Here with @thomasdaccord

October 8th at 1pm (eastern) “Slideo logy” by Safari Books Online http://bit.ly/Plb6I from @rucsb

October 22nd FETC virtual online conference All Day

November 17th Tech and Learning Magazine Virtual Tech Forum All Day

December is going to be packed with sessions from The k12online conference. The presenters have been announced here. I will update when the schedule is posted.

Every week you must check the classroom 2.0 calendar. They have a stocked archive page too, here.

I would also like to showcase a local organization to me the New Hampshire Society for Technology in Education, to quote:

NHSTE has again purchased a “Season Pass” for all of the upcoming ISTE Technology in Practice webinars. That means the webinars are FREE! NHSTE is hosting these webinars at various host schools around the state. The series of webinars, entitled “Technology in Practice”, typically start at 4 pm. ISTE’s Technology in Practice Webinar series focuses on Web 2.0 and other collaborative online tools, as well as innovative tools and approaches. ISTE brings popular NECC presenters, nationally recognized Ed Tech leaders, and enthusiastic technology-use innovators to you via these webinars.

Does your local CUE organization have a similar offering, if not, it could be a good additional member benefit and networking opportunity. I am planning on going to one of these at a school local to me this week. Will let you know how it goes.

Photo:

Anyway blog comments make the day shinier,

so if you know about any upcoming webinars share them here!

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1. How will you share BLC10?

Did you know

1. You can backup your delicious account by exporting a html file of your bookmarks. The file can be read by most browsers and the links are active. You can use a “find on this page” to search the file. This could be quicker than searching tags in delicious if you are as disorganized as I am with your tags.

Got to Settings>Bookmarks>Export

2.  Find people to learn with. At the right hand side of all your bookmarks there is an icon that represents how many other people have bookmarked the same site.

If you click on that number you get to see who else has bookmarked the same site. When you click on these people you can lurk through their bookmarks and decide whether they would be worth adding to your network. Delicious also lets users add a profile link, so follow those and find out more about your potential contact.

If they are bookmarking good sites, it only makes sense to join and collaborate with them. Click Add To Network.

3. Tag Search all of delicious for a tag you use. If you have just bookmarked a site and used a tag. Other clever people will have used that tag and you might be interested in those sites too.  Click on tags>explore

This post is tagged 31dbbb (31 days to be a better blogger project) which is an obscure tag, but these types of tags are good to use when you are working on a project with or without others. Quick way to isolate or collect a group of sites.

4. Hide stuff. You don’t have to be so public. Click “do not share” on those websites that you would like to keep private. Birthday wish lists, vacation plans etc. Click to box do not share

5. Stay ahead by subscribing to a particular tag, this means you get the research power of every other delicious user working for you. If you have a particular user you follow, you can specify to subscribe just to their tag saves. I don’t use this often enough, and need to make a mental note to do this more.

6. Go back in time and attend conference that is already over. Search for the conference tag and retrace the online conference story. This is useful to find not only links being talked about at a conference, but also presentations online, people attending, so connect with their delicious account. Tech ed conference tags include NECC08, k12conferenceonline, educon21,  educon.

You can also attend a conference virtually in a similar way, by subscribing to an rss feed for the conference tag. To find conference tags, sometimes you have to be a bit of a sleuth, look at the website, search twitter. Keynote speakers will usually have links to their handouts and presentations on their website or blog which will be tagged correctly. Tags for tech conferences are the easiest to find.

7. Delicious To Go On the iphone and ipod touch, there is no copy paste yet, so to post to delicious while browsing can be done. Check out this video from CNET

Get del.icio.us on an iPhone @ Yahoo! Video

8. And the ultimate delicious game. When you click on the number of people who have bookmarked a link. Delicious tells you who first bookmarked the site. Be the first! It’s a game.

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If my children’s teachers and principal’s lived by these tweets. All would be well.

It’s never this simple, but it should be.

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Disctinct memories that stick in my mind now it is Monday include:

Chris Lehman saying he wants 4 things for “his kids”. He want them to be thoughtful, compassionate, kind, and wise.

These tweets were particularly pertinent for the educational content:

And then these for their use of twitter during the conference

The conversations I heard helped me learn how to be a better teacher.  They helped me learn how to articulate a message more eloquently,  and it helped me transcend the potential budget cuts that came down today at school. We will still teach, we can still have conversations with our students, and we can still model goodness.

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A ”tweet call out” last week from coolcatteacher had me engaging with a classroom outside of my own school, outside of my own state. She was demonstrating twitter to her class and called for us to respond by replying to her and sharing where we were from and how we used twitter. Coolcatteacher (aka Vicki Davis) had the responses on the screen for her class to experience. I responded that I learn something from twitter everyday and I  pass it on when I can.

The resource that I passed on today was about the inauguration. Inaugural Words.

I emailed it to all the teachers in the school at about 11am and retweeted.

After the inauguration speech today, another tweet came in that the page had already been updated to include the latest from Barack Obama. Unbelievable. The word of this inauguration day.

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I sent him to a twitter4teachers wiki.

I had added my twitter id a few weeks ago. I hope he finds some great people to connect and learn with. I am sure others will respond with good info too, so I will check back.

Today, just a small post. Had a tech committee meeting till nine and it is late. That could have been a tweet.

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