It’s crazy in San Antonio with all of the people walking around the River Walk with their laptops.  The weather is  sultry, but the air conditioning is cranked high, so it actually quite chilly in the convention center.

On Sunday Deb and I rented a car and drove to the Hill Country and Fredrickburg.  We ate lunch at cute garden restaurant with a live guitar player.  We ate migas and then headed up to Enchanted Rock.  We hiked to the summit–1800 feet!  It was a good climb and the summit had beautiful views.  Then we decided to go on one of the canyon trails and go around the big rock.  The trails were narrow and lined with cacti–I’m building to something here.  About fifteen minutes into our hike, I slipped and fell onto a cactus.  I had needles in my hand, wrist and backside.  Deb filmed the whole thing–gotta love the Flip Camera–she’s making a documentary.

So after much needed showers, we headed over to the convention center for the reception.  At the NECC reception there were so many people (many wearing cowboy hats with a SMART logo) that the whole center was packed.  We headed up to the poster sessions and avoided the long food lines and the live band with the 2nd Life simulcasting (that was a bit eerie) where there were a bunch of clustered posters about Global Learning.  I really like the way that NECC has organized the posters around common themes so that you can spend time with many posters of interest at one time instead of running back and forth.

There were a couple of really interesting sites that will be good for next year including

TakingITGlobal which gives students the opportunity to learn about and discuss global social issues and what they can do to get involved in helping solve them

Panorama is TakingITGlobal’s online magazine–it has a focal social issue (poverty, climate change, etc) for each issue. Students can submit, or volunteer to edit–cool opportunities

Telling Their Stories is an unbelievably cool project where students have interviewed Holocaust survivors, Japanese internment camp survivors, WWII veterans.  The whole interview is uploaded and there is a transcript of the questions and the answers.  The kids did an unbelievalbe job and the videos would be a great resource for students when they read Wiesel’s Night or Otsuka’s When the Emeror was Divine.  Could be a nice independent project for listening/watching and also good examples for student interviews.

At dinner, we met Howard (last name?) from WGBH-Boston who told us about Teachers’ Domain (it’s put out by PBS)  that has a lot of cool resources–one that looked particularly interesting was the Poetry Everywhere.

Lots of information before the conference has even really started!

So procrastination has always been my strong suit. I went to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library with my son’s 5th grade class and bought a magnet with Lincoln’s quotation “Whatever you are be a good one.” School is out and I have somewhat caught up with the camp forms and other monstrosities that have awaited my summer self to emerge from the stacks of essays, and now I turn to the daunting task of the 31 Day Comment Challenge (which I have been keeping up with) and reflecting on what I have learned.

Day 1–Self Audit

The self-audit was very helpful–I realized that I read blogs, but rarely comment. I didn’t know how to track my comments, so I never actually saw if someone reacted to what I had commented on. I had recently started a class blog (in April) so I had been very busy commenting on my students’ blogs, but I rarely ventured out beyond those I knew.

Day 2–Comment on a New Blog

This one was easy because almost any blog I commented on was new. I commented on many blogs, clicking around and reading blogs that were cited in other blogs. Sometimes I got responses, sometimes I didn’t. I commented on some student blogs and did not receive any responses. That made me realize that I needed to explicitly tell my students that they needed to respond to each comment or the conversation might not ever happen. Some of my students did this naturally, but others definitely needed to be coaxed.

Day 3–Track Comments

This was perhaps the most helpful assignment. I didn’t know anything about cocomment and am very pleased to get to know its acquaintance. I’m still not certain why some comments appear several times and I’m not sure what the orange CO means and what the envelope means, but I click on them and can track my comments pretty easily. I became so dependent on it that when I changed my theme and cocomment didn’t work, I sent out an SOS. Amazingly, through eerie keywords I guess, cocomment and edublogs fixed the problem and now OceanSide now is compatible with cocomment.

Day 4–Ask A Question

I visited Christine Martell’s blog  about visual noise and was amazed by what I learned about the eye’s F pattern.  I don’t particularly like reading online, and  this post helped me  understand why.  I asked her if she would take a look at my blog and because of her feedback, I have changed the look and feel of both of my blogs.  Without the Challenge, I doubt  I would  have ever had the nerve to ask the question.

Right now I’m up to my eyeballs in documentary film blogs.  Please visit my other page to see what my sophomores are doing right now.  You can read their blogs as well.