#FlipCon12, Day 0

Jac de Haan stepping in for Dan Spencer, Snapseed photo edit

There is something to be said for learning from folks for months and months on Twitter and then getting to meet them in person – it is a pretty cool thing. I was lucky enough to get to spend today at the #FlipCon12 pre-conference polishing up my lackluster Camtasia 2 for Mac skills. See the finished product here – make sure to keep your expectations low… (Background noise, cluttered desktop, etc etc etc.) It was neat to get to spend the day learning from Dan Spencer, Kristin Daniels, Jac de Haan, and Brett Clark, people from my PLN who I finally got a chance to meet, talk to, and learn from in person.

Takeaways from day 0? There was a lot of great energy today, and there were only about 1/3 of the number of folks as there will be at #FlipCon12 tomorrow – can’t wait for that energy and those ideas to triple! And despite the shabbiness of the video I added here, I am way more comfortable with Camtasia. And finally, the coolest idea from the day – screencast your feedback on student writing: do this as you read their submitted Google doc. This will hopefully let me provide the feedback I would have given my students in writing, but in video form. I hope this technique will allow me to leave more, and more detailed, feedback in a similar amount of time to the current amount it takes for me to give feedback in writing. I’m psyched to give it a try in my classroom in the fall!