David Warlick's Pre-Conference Keynote

The K12 Online Conference officially begins next week, but you can check out David Warlick's pre-conference presentation entitled "Derailing Education: Taking Sidetrips for Learning" at http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=26

You can download the presentation video (85 MB) in mp4 format, or just check out some of the helpful handouts on using Web 2.0 technologies like Blogger, Bloglines, flickr, and EduBlogs.

After reading some of the comments on the K12 Online Conference blog about Warlick's presentation, I can't wait to watch the video! It is getting rave reviews!

But in spite of all the great things people have to say about David, here is a great observation posted by Laura B. Fogle about Web 2.0 technologies that really hits home:

I have a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, and six years as a
computer technical support engineer, one year as a programmer. Yet, I haven’t
gotten the RSS feed from my blog working the way I want. I don’t have Technorati
tags on it, but I don’t really get how they work. How do we expect teachers, who
are up to all hours grading papers and preparing lessons after THEY get home
from open house and put their kids to bed, to figure this stuff out? We have to
push to make it less cumbersome. The tools have to become more user friendly.

And I will second that motion! Vicki Davis, the Cool Cat Teacher, said that she had difficulty viewing Warlick's video. She's posted some instructions on her blog to assist others in getting it to play. She had the determination and took the time to make it work. How many teachers would have given up within 5 minutes because of all the other stuff (see paragraph above) they still had to do?

Fortunately for me, I didn't have the same codec issues as Vicki. I just had to double-click the mp4 file and it opened right up in QuickTime player. I don't have QuickTime Pro, but I do have QuickTime Player 7.1