Early June Ramblings

A lot o' things. A lot o' things going on.

Hi, all, I just finished posting at my Falcons Tech blog and since I'm in the groove I wanted to update here. It'll likely be a bit of a chaotic post, since my life is sort of there at the moment.

Mostly, having put the school year behind me, I'm looking ahead to 2018-19 as we move into a portable during construction and then into a brand new computer lab. I'm working on ways to fund new equipment in the new lab. Stay tuned on that...

Looking immediately ahead, I'm knee-deep in the planning for ISTE2018 in Chicago. I'll be flying up the 22nd to get the lay of the land and attend pre-conference activities, particularly Hack Education 2018 on Saturday, an "unconference" that is always a deep learning dive.

On Monday morning, June 25, the Virtual Environments Network presents its 2018 Virtual Environments Playground. VEN was one of the first ever "Focus Groups" to present a day long, themed event, the "Second Life Lounge," in Atlanta at my first ISTE conference. Back then the conference was called NECC (the National Educator's Computing Conference), and that format morphed into the "Playground," as the "Second Life Playground," and then settled into the "Virtual Environments Playground" the third year of its existence. Learn about the beginnings of ISTE.

Anyway, that's my fun focus now. It's especially challenging as our focus at VEN has broadened to include, not just virtual worlds like Second Life and OpenSim, but all things virtual--mixed, augmented, and virtual realities. Along those lines we have some very special guests at the Playground this year. When schedules get finalized, which we anticipate being so on June 19, you'll be the first to know here.

I am also fishing every day I can this summer. I caught a nice catfish at Lake Marrowbone just Monday:

Finally (for now) I just had a birthday and my much-loved, loving wife bought me a new toy, the just-released Oculus Go. I'm very much enjoying noodling around in there and looking for educational potentials--my focus in all things new. Expect some blogging on that here. I am firing back up a dormant blog, "Nashville360VR" just for fun, so head on over there if you have some goggles, or even if you don't.

Over and out for today. #abetterbloggerinthesummer.

Virtual Environments Playground Walkthrough

Hola, ya'll,

I'm cleaning up my laptop after travel to Denver for ISTE10 and my wonderful experience with friends and colleagues from all over the country, nay, all over the world.

I'm also preparing for my trip to Boston Wednesday for Thursday and Friday's Apple Summer Learning Institute for teachers. I'll certainly be sharing from there.

In the course of my cleanup, I discovered a number of fun little video snippets that I will store and share as I find useful. Here's the first, a walkthrough of the Virtual Environments Playground on Tuesday. I'd just finished sharing what was going on there with Jan Zanetis of ISTE Live, videoconferencing out to several locations nationally, and at one point in this video you can see Jan continuing to interview one of our attendees for the remote audiences. I think this does a pretty good job of capturing the feel of the event, which lasted for three days, beginning Monday morning, June 28, at 8 a.m. and wrapping up at 1 p.m. Wednesday. Walk through with me...