Tuesday afternoon/evening at NECC

The afternoon started out great, visiting during lunch with Bernie Dodge about his new WebQuest creation tool, QuestGarden.

After that it was off to the vendors, where there was a ton of new products, updates to exisiting products, and just good information. Too much to absorb at one time. I will have a special post just on the product info I picked up at NECC.

Then off to a session on Moodle, an open source product for producing online course content. It is a direct competitor to Blackboard and WebCT (both of which I have used) but it is free! The room was packed to overflowing, and they tried to keep late attendees out but they were willing to stand in the back of the room or sit on the floor.

I have used Moodle, and plan to use it more in the future. The local university that I teach for online requires WebCT, but ….

From there it was off to the business meeting for the ISTE SIGTC meeting (Special Interest Group for Technology Coordinators).

Then I went to a special evening event sponsored by Clarity Inovations, who are involved with the eSchool News Ed-Tech Insiders blog and the NECC aggregated blog. Thor Prichard was the host, but Steve Burt and others from Clarity were also there. Several of the Ed-Tech Insiders were there like Tim Wilson, Tom Hoffman, Will Richardson, Tim Lauer, and myself. It was a great time meeting these people face to face.

Then it was to a special Podcasting event hosted by Apple Computer at 9:00 pm. We got there early enough so we got a seat, but the room was packed and they had to organized an improptu 2nd session so that everyone that came could get to see the presentation. Imagine that many techno “nerds” in Philadelphia showing up at 9:00 pm to see a presentation on Podcasting…

During the presentation (which was Podcast) they did a quick demo of the latest version of iTunes (Mac or Windows) that can find and automatically download Podcasts of your choosing.

Tim Wilson did a short Podcast afterwards that he is going to post on his blog at Savy Technologist with some really top notch portable equipment.

Then it was a quick visit with a group of “techies” from Grand Forks, ND and then off to the hotel room to update my blogs.