The Dunoon/Georgia Connection in San Francisco

I love this blogging world. Where else can moments like this seem to keep happening? I keep getting blown away by such moments. A couple of weeks ago I found out that since NECC was in Atlanta this year my travel budget was letting me attend another conference. Several searches later I found a conference in San Francisco that fit the bill with what I wanted to learn. I only had a week to make it happen and the fares were out of sight. Yikes! I have some travel funds but they weren’t going to stretch to cover expenses with fares topping out at 5 or 600 dollars. I tried Hotwire for the first time and found an incredible fare through some special offer. You have to book it before you know the schedule but they guaranteed no more than one stop and that you will arrive on the same day. I went for it and lucked out with a non stop out and one stop returning with a fantastic fare of $269 round trip. I took that as an omen that I was meant to go and little did I know what was going to unfold. The conference has been absolutely awesome. I’ll be blogging about it for a while because my schedule has been jammed packed with some of the best sessions I have ever attended. I haven’t had many moments to stop and blog but the blogging will follow over the next few days. I want to share.

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Shaken Not Stirred

Seismograph - University of Nevada, Reno, 11:45PM latest night

Reported to keep going a 5.0 quake

UPDATE: Wobble instantly uttered to be born with been 4.7 … flawed manifold home walls newest northwest Reno, busted varied sprinkler pipes, busted the channel old to accompany drag oneself downcast to Reno from Holder Tahoe newest the 1800’s … straightaway tatty to carry H2O to the Speech Misdirect H2o Running plant.

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Time

I never have enough time to teach everything I want to teach — at least not the way I want to teach it.  I have found myself frustrated this year after writing some very good UbD units, only to find I have to cut out parts in order to finish the work in the amount of time I have available.  I have also had to contend with Jewish holidays, our peculiar school schedule, and shorter class periods.  When I taught public school, each class period was at least 50 minutes long.  My classes work out to be 45 minutes long each day (one day is a double period of 90 minutes, but we have class only four days of week, so the average is 45 minutes).  Five minutes doesn’t seem like a lot, but over the course of a week, that’s an average of nearly a half hour.  I just don’t feel as though I really do justice to some of the topics I teach as a result.

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Witness the collaboration

This post by joi ito includes a 10-minute segment from a massively multiplayer game as it is played by about 40 people on a recent weekend. Marc Prensky and others are explaining to us that as our kids play games of this sort they are learning. As I watched and heard the collaboration of the guild members bringing down Garr, I both saw the great fun it must be to participate and the collaboration skills of the players in action.
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