Franklin County Summer Training Opportunities

Franklin County is offering summer Technology training again, but a little differently this time. Instead of offering it all during one week of the summer, they’ve spread sessions out across the summer. It’s an excellent way of gaining some new technology skills, and for free. To learn more about these sessions, please visit their site:  Franklin County Teacher Training

For Salem Employees, you can earn five re-certification points for any full day workshop and five points for two half-day workshops.

Counting Down until VSTE 2008

I’m pretty excited about the upcoming VSTE Conference starting Sunday at Hotel Roanoke. Conferences are a major source of professional development for me…and one way I stay on top of the up and coming trends in Instructional Technology. This is the first and only conference I’ve been able to attend for almost a year and a half, so I can’t wait!! I’m also excited about the prospect of connecting with people I’ve been communicating with via Twitter, Second Life, Ning, and other means (but either have never met in person or haven’t seen in a long time). It will be good to see familiar faces from nearby schools systems, as well, and catch up. I learn so much from getting to talk with other people in the Instructional Technology field.

If you don’t have a chance to attend VSTE in person, you can always attend virtually. The easiest way to see what all the attendees are learning/sharing/doing is to use a service called HitchHikr. Attendees to the conference (hopefully) will tag their blog entries, pictures, videos, bookmarks, etc. with “VSTE2008” so that Hitchhikr will pick up their posts. On a smaller scale, the Salem ITRTs usually take notes on the SCSTech Wiki, so you can look there too if you want to see what things strike our fancy. Personally, I’ll be blogging as I run across great ideas, and I’ll be tagging links in del.icio.us too so that I can share with others back at school. Maybe I can find an idea or two that I can pass along to you! I can’t wait!

HitchHikr for VSTE2008

Delicious tags for VSTE2008

Salem Attendees’ Notes for VSTE2008

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