This past Thursday and Friday I attended IETC in Springfield, IL.  As usual, it was an excellent conference.  I even presented for the first time in years!  I was shocked to see a full room for my session "F.R.E.E. - Fantastic Resources for the Enthusiastic Educator."  Thanks to all of you who atually sat through it!

I especially enjoyed David Jakes' Web 2.0 Workshop.  Now, it was sort of a Web 2.0 for Beginners workshop, but I don't really think of myself as a beginner.  However, even though I use web 2.0 tools, love them, see the unbelievable value in them in education, I still have trouble explaining some of the concepts to the teachers I work with.  Dave makes these understandable and unintimidating (is this a real word?). 

Dave talked about the "big 5" tools of web 2.0: blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, podcasting, and flickr.  When explaining about RSS and aggregators, he called that the RSS feeds the "mail," and the aggregator the "mailbox."  Such a simple analogy that I think all teachers can understand.  I definitely plan to use this with my teachers.  He also shared the video "RSS in Plain English" with me (below) which I found very helpful as well.  Thanks, Dave, and thanks to the committee for putting together an excellent conference!

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