geek.teacher

Due to a lack of funds (hey, I’m moving!), going to ISTE this year was just not going to happen. Fortunately for me, a confluence of factors turned this weekend into a conference weekend anyway, complete with networking with Twitter friends.

My wife was out of town for the weekend, and a good friend of mine just so happened to be going to DC for the annual American Library Association conference. He had an extra bed in his paid-for by work hotel room and invited me to join him. One bus trip later, and I’m in DC.

Something many people don’t know about me: I was a teenage librarian. In high school I spent a year working after school in my high school’s library, and then two years working in my town’s public library in their children’s department. It was a formative experience that definitely helped set me on my future career path as an educator. Given that, I spent the $25 for the exhibits floor pass.

In a lucky coincidence, I saw that Melissa Techman was going to be in DC on Saturday for the conference. A year ago at NECC, I went down for a day and had lunch with a bunch of special educators and a few other “friends of sped,” Melissa being one of said friends. In some nice symmetry, this year I got to go out to lunch as a friend of libraries with Melissa, Diane Cordell (a long-time Twitter friend that I finally got to meet in person), Gretchen Caserotti, Cathy Jo Nelson, and Kathy Ishizuka. We had plenty of good food and better conversation, as was the case last year.

Kathy is the Technology Editor for the School Library Journal, and later wrote me an e-mail asking for my impressions of the conference. Here’s what I wrote in reply:

It’s funny, this is the second year in a row that I’ve been to the Washington Convention Center and only been able to see the exhibits floor for a conference. The floor is pretty much like the floor of any other large convention: it’s heavy on the free stuff and phony marketing interactions. On the plus side for ALA, this convention didn’t seem to have any strange cult-like booths like the SMART booth at NECC last year.

As a special educator,I was really disappointed on the floor by the assistive technology pavilion, which didn’t seem to really have much in the way of assistive technology at all that I could see. I’d imagine that people with reading difficulties are one of those underserved populations that could stand to have more opportunities for access, and there wasn’t much of that there.

I noticed a definite trend toward making friendlier spaces for the visiting public. Lots of furniture and shelves that look cozy and inviting. I noticed in one booth they were featuring gaming stations to try and get the teenage demographic back into libraries. In the same tone, it was nice to see a good-sized presence of companies that produce comic books and graphic novels there.

On a side note: I’m somewhat surprised by the number of companies that specialize in moving libraries.

Just from the bits and pieces I picked up on from talking to some people and listening in on some others, it’s interesting to see many of the same shared anxieties that teachers and librarians share right now. Increasing technology and decreasing tax revenues are big stressors on both groups, and I very much get the feeling that we’re in the midst of a major reordering of the way the world works for all of us. I think the concern for both groups at the moment is to get out in front of the changes to help guide them in a positive fashion.

Today I finished up my final session of Professional Development to explain to some of the teachers in my school basic concepts behind building a Personal Learning Network and the tools they need to do it. I previously wrote about my first sessions here, under the lofty opinion that I, and I quote, “don’t suck.”

I think that I chose appropriate terminology there, because my performance was admittedly rocky in following weeks. The last two weeks in particular, I found myself not so happy with my performance on the first day of the session, and more pleased with the repeat the following day. Would more practice have been more beneficial? Quite possibly. But having never really on my own developed a scope and sequence like this for adults, I think I also kind of needed to see the places where people got confused the first time so that I’d have a better handle on it the second time.

I ended up choosing a sequence of Docs > Diigo > Reader > Twitter, figuring that I’d move them increasingly from a position where they can just interact with people in the building to further interaction with a larger community.

General observations, in no particular order due to impending brain implosion from too many things running through it*:

• I scheduled an hour for each session, but I should have probably made them each at least 1.5 hours. The first day stretched naturally to 90 minutes without complaint, but the later sessions people had places to go and I had to let them go at 60 minutes. Especially the last two sessions, I have absolutely found myself kicking myself with the stuff I didn’t have a chance to get to, especially in regards to the important parts about really interacting with your larger PLN
• Seeing the teachers “get it” is just as awesome as seeing the lightbulb turn on in a child. I knew I had hit something today when one of the teachers in my group independently started to send @ messages to the other people in the group, which got all of them then sending messages to each other. Serendipitous.
• There is an awful lot of vocabulary to explain to a bunch of technological neophytes.
• My Twitter network is awesome. I asked for some shoutouts yesterday, and over 90 people responded. Brilliant. More than anything else, the international tweets truly wowed some of my group.
• When you’re showing off Twitter to your audience, it’s pretty comical to open it up just in time for them to see Ira Socol calling Diane Ravitch a “war criminal.” and then have to explain that, no, he’s not joking.
• I loved it when they realized that someone took really good notes in Google Docs, and they could ask her to share it with everybody at once.
• Some people had to miss the session today but asked if I could still show it to them anyway next week. So they want to know!
• I’m honestly not sure how many will go on to use these tools on a regular basis. If I get one or two regular Twitter users out of the 15 or so people I started with, is that a success or failure? Sure, it’s two more than we had before, but that’s a pretty horrible ratio.
• Piggybacking on the last point: could I have done more to get them using the tools, or is exposing them to the tools enough?

I have a lot to reflect on, and I’m sure I’ll have more in another week or so when I get the Evaluation Form together on Google and ask them to fill it out. Right now I’m a bit worried that they’ll be too soft on me and not point out stuff that I need pointed out to me. Conversely, I’m also worried that they’ll confirm my worst fears about doing a terrible job. For the record, I don’t think I did a terrible job, which is why it would be terrifying to find out that I actually did so. When I get some results back, maybe I’ll post a followup assuming that I haven’t died from mortification.

*Big big announcement coming real soon. I might explode from not telling the world yet.

After a year of taking pictures, I’ve done it. Slightly over a year ago I received my first digital SLR camera as a super-generous Christmas gift from my parents. I knew from the start that I wanted to really get in a lot of practice with my camera, so I committed to participating in Project 365, in which you attempt to take at least one photo a day for an entire year.

Here’s the first picture I took of my brother right after I pulled my camera out of the box and had fiddled with the settings to ensure the one thing I knew I wanted to do, shoot in RAW:

While I was totally blown away by the quality of the photos from this camera, I still had a long way to go in learning how to use it…this was shot in P mode, which is fully automatic. I knew that I loved the “blurry background,” but had no idea how to do that. I was really flying blind. Fortunately, I brought my network with me. I got a lot of starter advice from Craig Nansen, who helped me understand a lot of the basics to using a DSLR. As time went on, I also got several pieces of advice from my good friend Brian Taylor.

Speaking of the network, here are the most important pieces of advice I can give to somebody who wants to do a 365. Join Flickr. Then be sure to join at least one group that’s dedicated to doing a 365. Submit your photos to the group every day. For me, I topped it off by following the RSS feed for one of those groups in Google Reader. If, like me, you check your RSS feeds every day, following your group’s feed will constantly remind you to take your picture every day. I would have forgotten many times if not for my group posting their pictures, and I thank them immensely for that. When I started to realize that I would sometimes get comments on my photographs, I also started to follow my activity feed. Feedback from other users will make you look forward to posting your better shots. While I got plenty of great comments from people over the course of the year, I especially have to call out Kathy Onarheim for her consistent efforts at commenting on my pictures, and, I’m sure, the pictures of many other people. I also got a lot of nice comments from Damian Bariexca.  When I paid for my Flickr pro membership, I did it specifically because of the community.

Over the course of the year, I actually ended up taking over 7000 exposures on my dSLR. That’s more photographs than I had taken in the previous 7 years of owning a digital camera combined. It’s overwhelming to me how many pictures I took this year, and, more obviously, how much I disliked so many of them afterwards. Looking at my “favorites” smart folder in iPhoto, I seem to be really happy without about 6% of the photos I take.

I first knew that I was understanding how to actually use my camera about 3 weeks after I got it. We went to dinner at a hibachi place, and I got this shot:

It took some serious playing around on my part to get the shots just right, so i felt pretty proud of myself after seeing how this one came out. I’m still learning, but it surprises me that now, when somebody recently asked for advice on how to take pictures of fireworks, I was able to point him to some of my shots from Independence Day at the Art Museum and rattle off the settings I used.

One of my favorite parts about having completed the project is the ability to look back at a year of pictures, and see some of the themes I returned to over and over again. So, to conclude this post, some of the more common themes and subjects I used in my 365:

Pictures of animals, most frequently my cats: 64

Pictures related to food in some way: 50

Pictures of buildings: 41

Pictures of complete strangers: 34

Pictures with a nature theme: 30

Pictures featuring my wife, Beth: 19

Self-portraits: 12

Pictures of my godchild, Nora: 8

Pictures of my nephew, Julian: 3

Pictures of Abe Lincoln:2

I created a disclosure policy page after reading this post by Wes Fryer, who is clearly both more on top of these things than I am and more knowledgeable about the quickest place to go to create your own policy in two minutes. Long story short, new FCC mandates want bloggers to explain what kinds of money they might accept and why. Figured I’d do it now before it languishes on my to-do list.