Elevating Conversations

Here at Elevate 2008, my favorite part is the conversations I’m having with VC friends from here and there and everywhere. Here are a few snippets of those conversations.

Tracy from BC
I met Tracy from BC, a teacher-librarian. We had several great conversations about Read Around the Planet, using Web 2.0 tools, and professional development opportunities. We hope to connect our classes soon.

Chris from Australia
I told Chris about our connections to Australia in May. We talked about things we could do together. I know some of my schools would be willing to connect to Australia in the evening during a parent night or something similar. We also talked about my idea in the projects booklet of time-delayed collaborations with the Polycom RSS or a similar device. I’m hoping we can actually make some of those happen this year.

H.239 with Ken, Shane, Roxanne
I learned another reason not to use H.239 / People Plus Content / DuoVideo. Did you know that only one site in the conference can send H.239 at a time? I can think of several projects we run where we show each other content at the same time. This standard is designed for one way presentation style communication, not the interactive-engaging-collaborative-constructivist-learning experiences we prefer to do.

CILC Content Dollar Bank with Ruth
Ruth Blankenbaker and I had a chat about their dollar bank program. It’s a really cool service for anyone struggling with the challenges of scheduling and managing the funding of a lot of content provider programs. She said schools are using it for managing grant funding and for after school programs.

Chatting about firewalls with staff from an unnamed district
It’s so unfortunate when networks are locked down so tight that you can’t call another school in your building, and your tech won’t give you an IP address to give to the place you want to connect to. It’s so challenging to solve the connection problems with H.323 and firewalls. It’s nice to get together with friends and mutter together.

These are just a flavor of the conversations from Elevate 2008. If you were here, what conversations did you learn from?

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