Thursday, August 21, 2008

Ulearn08

I am just about to trawl through the many many options for breakout sessions for this years ulearn08 conference. There are so many great choices I really have to think carefully about what I want to learn about the most. What fits into my personal goals or needs?

I am also presenting 2 taster sessions eeek! In the first one I am looking at a comparison of 21classes blogging engine which I use for my class blog and edublogs which I use for my M3 Kids Making a Difference project. I will also be looking at the practicalities and scheduling for classroom blogging.
In the second taster I am going to talk about the value of Personal/Professional Learning Networks using Twitter, Diigo, Second Life and blogging etc. I am interested in having peoples input into their experiences and the benefits of their own PLNs. How important is your PLN to you?

Bring on ulearn08 -- I am really looking forward to meeting everyone from my PLN and other inspiring educators!

Mac Attack

I have just upgraded my TELA laptop and decided to change from a Toshiba to a Macbook Pro. I have been envious of colleagues with Macs because of some of the applications available such as imovie and garageband.
While I wouldn't consider myself an expert using a PC I do know my way around them pretty well -- including some geeky technical stuff. Now everyone will tell you that a Mac is easier and I am sure they are -- if you are not intimately familiar with PCs! So I have had some Mac anxiety the last few days. Culminating today when I went to edit a couple of goal setting sheets only to find they were Word 07 documents and the Mac didn't recognise them as Word docs. So they were opened up in the TextEditor. Which would have worked fine because I could have put it back on my pen and back onto a PC for editing. Except that I clicked on 'Revert to Saved' in the drop down menu because I thought that might do something interesting. It did! After clicking that I lost the original formatting and couldn't figure out how to get it back!

I'm sure it is all just teething problems. I certainly know I couldn't be without my wonderful Twitter network who come to my rescue and answer all my silly little questions!

Thanks Allanahk, fievels, fionagrant, lenva, heymilly, pgeorge, dorothyjburt, colwar and barbs1 -- you guys rock!

Virtual Attendees


Virtual Attendees, originally uploaded by FionaGrant.

Here I am inside Heymilly's laptop! I joined in virtually (using Skype) at the recent unconference in Auckland. It was great to be a part of it even though I wasn't actually there. I was able to listen to the conversations as well as being updated via Twitter and Skype chat. It was amazing to be in the 'company' of such inspiring educators.

Image by FionaGrant

Sunday, August 10, 2008

My Diigo Bookmarks (weekly)