Gadgets & Web 2.0--Highlights from BPI

The first three days of the week have been filled with sessions from the MCSD Best Practices Institute. I'm a first year attendee, though these have been going on for quite awhile. My gut reaction after attending has been, "Wow!" What a wealth of information delivered in fun and creative ways! The best part? It was all FREE!

I chose 6 sessions to attend, including the ones on tech held today. Leslie Fisher presented on Gadgets (love this) in the morning and Web 2.0 (Beyond the Basics) this afternoon....and my brain is on complete and utter overload...but I'm so excited about the wealth of information and can't wait to spend the rest of the summer exploring.

My new faves from the day included:

• LiveScribe Pens (and notebooks)  
• I liked that I could carry around a pen and notebook instead of lugging around my netbook or laptop and then...sync my notes to Evernote! I had seen a demo of these about a year ago, and while cool, didn't grab me until I heard about the sync today.  Oh, there are a wealth of educational uses for them too, and I can't wait to score a few for the library.
• Class Dojo 
• This website could be a 21st century answer to the age old problem of managing behaviors and communicating with parents.  Could definitely replace those weekly behavior sheets being sent home.
• Socrative App for iOS
• Turn our iPod lab into student response systems...need I say more?
• Lino-Sticky and Photo Sharing
• I see using this as a central place to collect resources for a training, a presentation on a topic, student reports...and I'm sure I will think of more.  It is visually appealing, has a cool factor, and is simple to start using.

I have more notes from this day that I will need to review...and I may discover a new favorite to add to the list.

Someone asked me one time if I ever slept, well, because I seem to know a lot about tech and other topics in my library world.  My answer...no, I sleep, but I keep up with the people that do keep up with the tech. Thank you to all those that genorously share the time, talent, and knowledge to help us all sound like we know what's going on with the ever-evolving tech world.

Interested in following some yourself?  Check out Bobbi Newman and Tony Vincent.  You can also tune into various hash tags over on Twitter: #edchat and #edtech

You can share your thoughts about your favorite tech tools in the comments or with me (@bookatarian) on Twitter.