We’re more than halfway through EduBloggerCon. I took a walk during lunch to gather my thoughts, reflect, and plan this blog post. These are my preliminary thoughts about EduBloggerCon.

I should have changed my Twitter profile picture or posted a picture of myself on this blog. I’ve had a few people come up to me and say “where’s the hat?” or “you don’t look like your Twitter picture.”

As with most conferences a huge source of value is connecting with other educators and developing ideas from those conversations. For the most part in today’s sessions I’ve just laid back and gleaned ideas from the conversations. The first session that I joined was hosted by Liz B. Davis. The session was a discussion about professional development structure and a sharing of ideas for improving professional development. Two the ideas shared in that session that I really liked came from Jeff Utecht. Jeff shared the idea of “speed pd” which takes the concept of speed dating and applies it to professional development. The other idea that I enjoyed was the concept of developing an Individual Technology Education Plan for teachers. Using the ITEP concept, the technology integrator, with the teacher, develops a list of goals for learning about technologies for the classroom.

The second session I attended was a discussion about the role of social networking in education. Two thoughts from that session that I enjoyed were raised by people whose names I forgot to ask for. The first thought, which I’m paraphrasing, was if the response by schools to social networking is to ban it, what happens if you ignore it? The second thought which is one that I can see myself using in future was the idea that social networking profile pages can be used to build an archive of student work and or student progress.

Now, I’m off to a session about Edublogging’s future.