I headed down to the merchandising table a little after 2:22. Fortunately, the crowds had died down a bit. Picked up a bunch of t-shirts, a 1GB flashdrive wristband, and got a free t-shirt and a vinyl VSTE portfolio. (Back in the day, we called it plastic. Vinyl was  a record.)

Slipped into the Web 2.0 session and saw a few pretty cool free online applications for word processing, photo editing, video editing, etc. Very interesting, and I posted a link to a large bookmark portal on del.icio.us . Now if we can just get the tag searches to work…

Feeling guilty, I stopped by the volunteer booth to see if there was something I could do to help out, and get one of those groovy orange shirts. I was right behind a teacher who was having to change her volunteer time for Tuesday to later in the morning. When I stepped up to the booth, I asked what position she had vacated, and was happy to discover that it was 9 a.m. in the merchandising booth – with Rich K.! Shhhhh. Don’t tell him. I want it to be a surprise.

I got up to the Washington Lecture Hall a little early and ran into Donna S. for ODC. John H. was there, too, and we all had a nice chat for a few minutes before the session on Podcasting for Digital Natives.

The speaker, John Hendron, is a podcasting guru, who has informed us that our students are “neo-millenials.” A study shows that 2/3rds of our students live online, and that 80% feel the web is important to their school work.

Speaking to podcasts, he says the straight audio podcast is not effective as one with visuals, and that they need to be between 30 seconds and 3 minutes. He spoke to having students create podcasts as part of projects, which is in line with something I am working on for my NETS-T exhibit. (Yes, I am one of those…).

Click on John Hendron’s website to find out more about where he’s coming from on podcasting and other digital educational resources.

Still deciding to what to do this evening. Check back in with me later. See ya!