At conferences like NECC it’s always a dilemma to select activities. There is always SO much going on, and often what I want to see happens simultaneously with other sessions I want to attend. Fortunately, many of the sessions are being podcast, so I may try to download a few of those that I missed and review them later.
I also try to balance sessions about absolutely new things with sessions on topics with which I’m familiar. Today it was the familiar. I attended two sessions on Google Earth and geotagging. I know the mechanics inside and out, but I wanted to get more curricular ideas to share in upcoming workshops I’m conducting in July.
The first session was "Staggerlingly Good Things Mixing Google Earth and Media" by Hall Davidson from Discovery Education. Most of the material I knew very well, but I still got some ideas for new things to try. I figure at least one new good idea makes a session worthwhile.
The second session was a BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop) session dealing with geotagging in Flickr. The session itself was very slow and tedious. This was no fault of the presenters, but due to the fact that everyone was trying to hit wireless and online resources at the same time. The connection was very slow. Due to the slowness, most of the presentation was at a very, very basic level. Since I already had my Flickr account and have been doing geotagging for so long now, I wound up assisting others at my table. The meat of what I wanted came at the very end of the session, when the presenter gave us a list of 25 ideas for classroom activities using geotagged photos. I’ll try to find those online and add a link.
Having seen the familiar, this afternoon I think I’ll delve into the less familiar.
[tags]NECC, NECC2007, geotagging, Google Earth[/tags]