Photos from TechForum, Linking Out

Miguel Guhlin has posted several photos from TechForum in Austin today to his blog, along with some commentary.

I am in the process of compressing audio from 3 of the TechForum sessions I attended and obtained permission to rebroadcast as podcasts right now, hopefully David Warlick and Miguel will be able to do the same for other sessions they attended, and maybe others…..

Just what are we doing here? We are blogging the conference! We need educators who attend all types of conferences to be doing this– not only does this greatly boost your own retention and understanding of discussed ideas, but it also permits others to access content and engage asynchronously via the read/write web in the discussions continuing after the conference is officially over.

Are you a school administrator, wondering what your teachers who go to conferences really are learning? Require them to blog the conference! And then email the links to their posts to your other teachers who did not attend, so they can read about what their peers learned and potentially benefit from their experiences. This is stretching technology and conference dollars in new and creative ways. And doing it requires no money, just time and some training. Edublogs and Blogger are the two top places I recommend for educators to setup blogs for professional use.

An important things for people who are blogging a conference to remember is to include relevant links to mentioned resources in their posts. This allows others to “link out” to that content which is of interest to them. I have not read about people discussing “linking out” as an instructional design method for blogging, but I think we should consider this. It is great to post ideas and have feedback with blogs, but one of the most powerful things blogs do in our hypermedia networked world is allow people to link out to other resources. This requires that blog post authors include linkable URLs. Thankfully with the read/write web and tools like WordPress (used by Edublogs) and Blogger, this process is fairly straightforward.

Hopefully at the TCEA 2006 conference in Austin, we’ll see a lot more people blogging the conference! 🙂

Technorati Tags: techforumtx

If you enjoyed this post and found it useful, subscribe to Wes’ free newsletter. Check out Wes’ video tutorial library, “Playing with Media.” Information about more ways to learn with Dr. Wesley Fryer are available on wesfryer.com/after.

On this day..

• Great Mobile Device Battery Chargers – 2014
• iCamp January 15, 2014 in Manhattan, Kansas: iPad Day! – 2013
• Preparing for STEM Lessons on Coding with Hopscotch for iPad – 2013
• Karl Fisch at the 2011 Innovative Learning Institute – 2011
• This is a LOT of computer monitors! – 2010
• The iPad as a TV game controller – 2010
• Transforming Classroom Practice with 1:1 by Jenny Wojick, Andy Marks, Janet Parkerson, Virginia Glass and Kelly Goldberg – 2009
• Classroom Basics for 1:1 Computing by Shawn Massey and Wynn Draper-Bryant (Flint Community Schools, Michigan) – 2009
• 10 things you can do with a laptop (Gary Stager at eLearn09) – 2009
• Rachel’s Haircut VoiceThread exceeds 15,000 views – 2008