Second Life NECC 2007 Birds of a Feather Video!!!

It's at the Scott in Second Life blog. Have at it! Oh heck, let's repost it here!

Thank you Zsuzsa Thomsen! You ROCK! I SAW you with that videocam. You did a great job of grabbing pieces of the hour and a half fun-fest that Jeremy and I did before he lost every electronic connection he had when his power went out from the San Antonio thunderstorm. It's always something!!!

Big Announcement for Attendees of My NECC Windows Podcasting Tools Session!

(part of the audience!)

I had so much fun sharesharing yesterday for the ~240 dedicated teachers, administrators, and technologists who packed my Windows Podcasting: Tools, Tips, and StraTegies for Success (ISTE dropped my internal cap on the last word in its title but I thought it was cute, don't you?) and want to thank you all for being there. Please feel free to add my feed to your RSS aggregator of choice for that podcasting device announcement I teased you with!

The winners of the two giveaway FlipVideo devices (THANKS, Simon at puredigital.com!!!) were Bruce Dale, Technical Support Specialist at Rabun County Schools in Tiger, Georgia and Brenda Thompson, teacher at Madison County School District in Flora, Mississippi. Congrats!

Seven other lucky winners took home items from FTC Publishing and some random other things from my office, including a Works Suite package and a 2003 Britannica Encyclopedia on CD (the boobie prize, to be sure but most likely a bonafide antique worth keeping). I want to sincerely apologize for the pandemonium that accompanied the prize drawing process (if you can call it that) but folks, I had NO IDEA that my session would be such a sellout, and had a process prepared for drawing prizes from a pool of certainly no more than 100...

Here's the announcement I want to make today: I have 100 magnatunes.com (remember, the cutting-edge independent music distributor website offering free music to podcasters?) to give away, courtesy of the generous John Buckman at Magnatune. You have to trust that I'll work out a good way to pick the first 100 emails I received in the mad rush to win yesterday, and winners will receive an email with an attachment to save that will have a gift card number to use on the website for up to 10 dollars worth of music. Most full albums at Magnatune average a price of 8 dollars, and John's hope is you'll "get" the unique service ethic there and come on back when you want new music that hasn't been filtered by the (all caps) MUSIC INDUSTRY musicmill.

Again, thanks so much and check back for more pictures here!

Day1, Saturday, the Edubloggercon "Unconference"

Made it down for the start of the edubloggercon "unconference," a jewel of an experience that was so inspirational it may as well have been the entire motivation for my driving down here. The morning session saw me chatting with Vicki Davis, a premier blogger who's CoolCatTeacher blog is a great resource for everyone. The room was full of active conversations as bloggers paired up to "interview" one another in order to flesh out the profiles on the edubloggercon site.

The session broke out into smaller ones and I gravitated to the Second Life session where I got to meet in person many of the amazing new friends I'm meeting in my avatar as "Scottmerrick Oh" inworld. We made some great progress, I think, toward gelling as a group to further investigate how SL can be used in the service of learning. See "Scott Merrick in Second Life" blog for more on that! Will be blogging there a bit later this evening, after finding some food.

That session was called to order by organizer Steve Hargadon and we merged two planned sessions into one called Schools of the Future, led by one of my personal heroes, David Warlick. Wow. I took video the whole time and though I'm sure David will podcast it, I'm working on making that video available. I'm a diehard supporter of audo podcasting, for a number of reasons, but this is one you might want to watch, just to see the engagement and the passion in the eyes of the 40 or 50 teachers in that room. There's hope....

Over lunch break I didn't eat but sat with those who did, catching up with email and formatting some of the video I took with my flipvideo device from puredigital.com. This device is one our tech coordinators at my school are experimenting with this summer, and I'm tellin' you, it's stellar.

After lunch break I caught Rushton Hurley's "Videos and Engaging Learning: session, learning and sharing alot. Rushton's working to save education one instruction video at a time at his unique and cleanly conceived NextVista.org. Join in. Help. Submit your own less-than-five-minute videos to the completely free teacher resource.

Tomorrow it's the grant writing session early a.m. then seat-dropping pamphlets and the like for the Keynote featuring Andrew Zoli, young educational futurist. Then the reception at the Georgia State Aquarium, the largest aquarium in the country, and helping welcome people to the Second Life section of that reception. All's good!

Monday it's a bunch of sessions; the Second Life "playground," showing it to the masses; a photoshoot for ISTE publicity, the SL Birds of a Feather session. That's as far ahead as I can think at the moment, though I'm thinking all the time about my session presentation on Windows podcasting tools come Tuesday...