Well, today certainly was mixed. I was up very early getting my gear packed and checked out of the hotel. I arrived at the convention center in plenty of time to check out the room, and get acclimated to the smell of mold. We’re in a different room for this morning’s presentations, and there is no air conditioning. Two box fans were set up in the room, and it was stifling.
Our first presentation was a complete bust. The Internet was being flaky, so we couldn’t do half of what we wanted to do. We could reach various websites, but then we couldn’t download the files we needed. Also, the video display with the projector was acting up. I kept getting more and more flustered. I think we got our information across, but not with the smoothness of yesterday’s presentation. I’d love to see the evaluation forms comparing the two.
The second session went much, much better. I still couldn’t download the KML files I needed, even using my own laptop instead of Andrea’s. However, I had most of my materials stored locally, so it wasn’t as much of a problem.
This second session was entitled “Geotag This! Adding Location to Learning.” I mostly focused on image geotagging, demonstrating triple tags, drag-n-drop map systems, and automatic tagging using GPicSync. I briefly touched on tagging videos and sounds, and used Eric Roger’s “A Day’s Drive from Greenville” to demonstrate how blog entries could be geotagged. There was lots of interest and lots of questions. I really had too much information to cover in such a short time. There were lots of people in the session that I knew, either colleagues, or people that had attended my training sessions with SCETV. It made up for the disaster with the first session.
The drive back was rainy, but uneventful. Traffic was terrible from Columbia on up I-26, but I made it home safe and sound, if not exhausted.