NECC 2009 - Washington DC

I attended my second NECC conference last week in Washington DC. This was my first trip to D.C. and I was able to get lots of sightseeing in over the weekend.

I found the NECC Ning and Classroom 2.0 ning to be very useful prior to attending the conference. I made a point of attending Steve Hargadon's presentation/Birds of a Feather on Web 2.0 and found lots of great information and new tools to try. I made time to attend sessions on the exhibit floor at SMART and new Google links (NECC presentations/and lessons) and a few other vendors. I enjoyed the poster sessions on various topics (PD, Web 2.0, ICT, student work, etc). Check out ISTE's new video station and watch the keynotes and many of the sessions at http://www.istevision.org/

I found myself using twitter (and tweetdeck with a cusomized NECC2009 Column). I had never used this feature! I found twitter a great way to stay connected with other users and actually showed to a few people while attending conferences. My tweets are on the sidebar of this blog. I particularly enjoyed watching the keynote debate interact with the audience using twitter. I found backchannels a great way to capture thoughts, questions and links during the presenters presentations. I hope to incorporate into my PD sessions this summer. I think it would be interesting to use during a staff meeting and hope to be able to deminstrate to my teachers when I return to school.

NECC will now be called ISTE 2010 and held in Denver June 27-20th. I enjoyed the conference and it was great to connect with so many great educators.