Conference Disappointment

Last week I attended the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference in Nashua, NH. In addition to my huge disappointment that the keynote speaker Peter Reynolds (with a focus on creativity and innovation), was sick and not able to present, I came away feeling a bit out of the loop. Throughout the day I heard about so many web 2.0 tools that I was unfamiliar with: animoto, classroom 2.0, twitter, etc. I hope to come away from Teaching and Learning in a Networked Environment with the tools to embrace Web 2.0 in my classroom. I thought that teaching iMovie, Flash, and Dreamweaver were big steps; it seems that that is not necessarily the case; I need to do more. I am thrilled that I will be forced to get the hang of wikis, using skype (I have a feeling that I will need to use a hard connect given my old wireless network), podcasting, and using googledocs (and this is my very first blog). Learn by doing...that's what works for me. As an aside, a lot of time was spent trying to figure out the profile page ('add a page' wasn't there) and neither were my toolbars (needed to get out of Safari and use Firefox). I'm making headway, slow but sure.