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!