Warning: squirrels.

GaETC 2007 Podcasts

About three weeks ago I had the honor of being a featured speaker at the 20th annual Georgia Educational Technology Conference. As in years past, the folks at the conference recorded two of my sessions and turned them into podcasts:

Keeping Up With the Googlebots: What’s New at Google (as of November 2007)

• Podcast
• PowerPoint presentation [zipped]
• Flash presentation

What’s New and What’s Different in Microsoft Office 2007

• Podcast
• PowerPoint presentation [zipped]
• Flash presentation

Podcasts for presentations of many of the conference's other featured speakers--including David Pogue, Leslie Fisher, Gail Lovely, Curtis Bonk, Doug Johnson, Annette Lamb, and many others--can be found on the GaETC Podcast page.

Enjoy!

Some concerns about the "Jesus" phone

With the Apple iPhone release just two days away, I still cannot decide if I will -- or even should -- buy one.  By now you have probably heard that David Pogue [NY Times] and Walt Mossberg [Wall Street Journal] gave the iPhone positive [albeit tenative] reviews.  In fact, here is Pogue's video review:

And here is Mossberg's:

As much as I want to buy an iPhone -- I think -- a few things are holding me back:

1. The iPhone's non-wi-fi internet connection will be frustratingly slow.  I know that for a fact because I am already an AT&T customer and use their EDGE network to browse the net on my Treo.  AT&T's EDGE network makes glaciers seem downright speedy.
2. The iPhone's lack of Flash support -- it doesn't even support Flash Lite -- means that while you may [eventually] be able to connect to the internet over the cellular network, you won't be able to view Flash-enabled websites or movies.
   
3. Because the iPhone doesn't offer voice dialing [where you press a button, speak a person's name, and the phone automatically dials that person], using an iPhone while driving could be downright dangerous.  Yeah, yeah ... I know.  I shouldn't use my cell phone -- even with my wireless Bluetooth headset -- while driving.  I do.  Get over it.  As Pogue mentions in his NY Times column, it takes up to six steps to wake the iPhone, locate an contact, and make a telephone call.  What Pogue fails to mention is that some of those six steps may require you to use both hands.  As an alert Slashdotter put it, "I want a 'jesus-phone', not a 'meet jesus phone'!"
4. With my wedding to Christine now only 10 days away, I should probably be saving my money for our honeymoon rather than splurging on [yet another] tech gadget ... especially considering that I just spent $130 to get my Xbox 360 repaired.

I'll keep you updated on what I decide.

Bama bound!

Well, I am off to the deep south tomorrow to speak at the Alabama Educational Technology Conference, see my family, and chow down on some exceptional barbecue, chicken fingers, and mexican food.  If you are going to be in Birmingham any time this week, stop by the Birmingham Jefferson Civic Center and say hi.

CATS 2007 conference presentations

As promised, here are the links to the presentations from this year's CATS conference:

• Streamed sessions [requires Java]
• Concurrent sessions

To view the descriptions, handouts, and PowerPoint presentations from any of the concurrent sessions, just click on the session title.  Also, the audio for the first half David Ernst's streamed keynote is a bit ... well ... hosed.  But the academic technology pyramid at 28:02 is worth checking out.

CATS 2007

Greetings from the CATS 2007 conference!  CATS is a professional development program that provides opportunities for California State University academic technologists to increase their knowledge, productivity, and professional effectiveness in service of their campus's academic mission and the CSU's educational technology goals.  It is also an opportunity to drink.  [As Randall Cunningham so eloquently stated: "CATS: cheaper than therapy."]

At most conferences I wind up doing a presentation or two, but CATS is one of the few conferences that I go to just so that I can be an attendee.  If you are a college-level academic or instructional technologist, you really should be here [and next year's CATS conference will be in Sonoma, which is reason enough to attend].

Anyway, be looking for some links to this conference's presentations in the next few days.

I'm back [again]

Note to self: Don't launch a new blog in the midst of cramming for the GRE and speaking at ed tech conferences in Illinois, Washington, and Michigan.

Well, I'm back.  Again.  I want to give a special thank you to the folks at the Illinois Technology Conference for Educators, Northwest Council for Computer Education, and Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning for inviting me to speak at their conferences over the past few weeks.

If you weren't able to attend my conference sessions, all [or at least most] of my presentations are are licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license.  For an alphabetic list of all of my presentations, including the ones I did at ILTCE, NCCE, and MACUL, just visit the PowerPoint Files section of my NetSquirrel.com website.

Happy downloading!

Illinois Technology Conference for Educators

It's conference time again.  My next stop is at the Illinois Technology Conference for Educators on Friday, March 2nd, at the Pheasant Run Resort and Convention Center in St. Charles, Illinois.  Drop by and say howdy if you are in the neighborhood.

I'm scheduled to give four 45-minute presentations:

• Crispen's Guide to What's New and What's Next
• Now that I know PowerPoint, How do I Use it to Teach?
• The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly—How Internet Filters Work, How They Don't Work, and How Students Bypass Them
• Google 201: Advanced Googlology

The cost to attend all of Friday's sessions, including mine, is $90.

GaETC 2006 podcasts now available

A few weeks ago, I was a featured speaker at the Georgia Educational Technology Conference [GaETC] in Atlanta.  GaETC just posted a podcast of two of my presentations as well as podcasts of presentations by Tony Brewer, Leslie Fisher, Will Richardson, Susan Silverman, Brent Williams, and Tonya Witherspoon.  There are three ways to find and download any or all of these podcasts:

1. If you have iTunes, you can open GaETC's podcast page directly in iTunes
2. You can point your favorite web browser to GaETC's podcast page and manually download the conference's MP3 files.
3. You can point your favorite RSS reader or podcast client program to GaETC's podcast RSS feed.

If you're new to the whole podcast thing, I suggest manually downloading the conference's MP3 files from the GaETC podcast page.  That's the easiest solution.

Oh, and here are the handouts that accompany my two podcasts:

• Keeping Up with the Googlebots: What’s New at Google [3.53 MB Flash file]
• Patrick Crispen’s Complete and Total Waste of Time [88 KB Flash file]

Enjoy!

NCETC 2006 - Greensboro, NC

Greetings from sunny Greensboro, North Carolina, home of the 2006 North Carolina Educational Technology Conference and the last stop on my 2006 ed tech conference tour.  I'll be presenting four different three-hour hands-on workshops followed by eight one-hour concurrent sessions this week, so if you are nearby the Koury Convention Center stop by and say hi.  And if you can't stop by, you can find and download [nearly] all of my conference presentations and handouts at http://netsquirrel.com/powerpoint/index.html.