Friday, June 15, 2007

NECC Helps for Bloggers

Attending the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC 2007) at the end of this month? (Or wishing that you could be?) Here are two quick tips for maximizing your "blog" exposure.

First, NECC is hosting a "Bloggers' Cafe" for the first time this year. This under-publicized lounge are will have casual seating for 15+, a smart board, and more. It makes sense that this might be a fun place for edubloggers and their friends to relax or gather. In that vein, I've created a Twitter account for the cafe which anyone can send a message to by email. When you are in the lounge, you can send an email that you are there, and anyone subscribed to the Twitter feed will receive your notification. If they want to join you, they can do so. Instructions are here.

Second, ISTE has done a great thing for NECC 2007: they've created individual blog tags or labels for each session (and presentation, meeting, lecture, showcase, etc.). This means that you can blog on specific sessions, and you can also keep track of all the blog posts and tagged photos from a specific session! This is going to be super helpful to both bloggers and readers, and especially to those who are not attending the show but want to keep up on certain topics.

However, the tags didn't get created in time to be in the printed NECC program, and they are currently only found on the NECC website by searching for individual session information. So, I've created a list of the session tags for NECC 2007, and added blog and Flickr links and feeds for each. See this long list (over 800 sessions) here.

I'll be hanging out at the Open Source Pavilion most of the time at NECC. If you are attending, please stop by and say hi!