More than a few educators from our area will travel to Philadelphia later this week to participate in EduCon 2.2.  EduCon is a mashup of Educational Conversations (not, conference).  Though it is considered a conference, it is more.  Read Chris Lehmann's reflection about what EduCon has meant to SLA (Science Leadership Academy), it's teachers, parents and most importantly, its students. 

Here's a bit that really resonates with me...

The conference is about the community of people and the ideas we share. It's not a place for big speeches, it's a place for well-thought conversation. It is a place for ideas, not stuff, and there isn't much swag at all and there isn't an exhibit floor. What there is, in abundance, is really smart people who care deeply about the future of education and how we all can make it better.

I've had the pleasure of learning at EduCon since its inception. You can follow more about EduCon at its new web site... http://educon22.org/ You can check out the conversations for EduCon 2.2 here. 

With the recent holiday and gift giving season there has been a bit of a buzz again this year about ebook readers. I had some personal interest regarding this as I seem to have a million and one PDFs that I want to read, but never seem to be able to sit down and read them on my computer.

Part of it is simply that I get distracted, the other piece is that I want to be able to write all over the document, or save a place and it never works with the ease of sliding a pencil between the pages, or dog earing a page.

Join Instructional Technology Specialists (ITS) from around Monroe County to meet, share, discuss and collaborate around local and regional projects such as Internet Safety, Digital Citizenship, Assessment, and other educational topics.

Yeah, Twitter's all the rage.  Well, at least it was for the latter part of 2008 and the better part of 2009.  There were endless companies proclaiming they're now on Twitter and Facebook, contests for the most Twitter followers, political uprisings, and Tweet (trash) talking by athletes.  Yes, the astronomic rise of social media has ushered in a new era of communication.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Blah, blah, blah.  Wondering why we joined the flock?  Read on.