Another excellent Edublogs.org weblog

Thanks, Lee, for making the start to this year’s FETC so great for me!  Here’s why:

Last night after driving up to Orlando from Boca Raton, I met Lee for dinner.  The surprise of the evening came when we walked into the restaurant and met up with a slew of folks from the Discovery Education Network and Dean Shareski from Canada.  Besides the fact that the food was great, the conversation was even better.

It’s amazing when you get a group of people around a table who all think the same way.  Since all of us are tech geeks in some way or another, and educators, you can imagine how the conversation went.

The best part for me, though, had to be the networking opportunity that came about as a result of this dinner.  Being to learn about the DEN Star program from the folks that run it, and to learn how a school district in Canada uses technology was just awesome.

So, thanks again to Lee.  And to Joe Jimena (I hope I spelled that correctly), Brad, Scott, Justin, and Carol from DEN-I look forward to working with you.  And Dean-look for me on Twitter.

I can’t wait to see what happens as the rest of the conference moves forward.

The first day back after break and you’d expect a few things to go wrong.  Well, today it seemed like a host of things went wrong all at the same time.

First, I was scheduled to have a Skype call with Carol Broos, a great teacher from Chicago, who is collaborating with me on a VoiceThread project on Abraham Lincoln.  We skyped over the break and worked out a call time only to have that thwarted by my district’s firewalls.  Oh well, plan B!  Plan B was to use an Adobe product that we have access to called Connect Pro.  A friend of mine in our ed tech department, Lee Kolbert, sent me the link to the meeting room that was set up for this meeting.  Well, there was one small problem there: the meeting room was locked.  Thanks to a quick text message, the meeting room was opened and I thought that we’d be off and running.  Not!

Just when I thought that was over, I came to find out that the speakers on my school computer weren’t working.  While this was happening, Lee was waiting for me in the meeting room while I was using the chat feature to tell her that I couldn’t hear a thing.  Some minutes later, along with a change to my Mac, I entered the meeting room and had a fantastic meeting with Lee.  A private tutoring session, if you will, on the Adobe product.

In the end, I now have access to a meeting room for this Lincoln project and others and had a great welcome to world of Connect Pro.  That is truly ed tech that really works!

Thanks Lee!

I thought that for this first entry I would take a little time to introduce myself and explain what the name of my blog means to me.  My hope is that after you’ve had a chance to read some of my future entries, the name will make sense to you, too.

First, though, a little about me.  I’m David Fisher.  I have a great wife named Margie and a super daughter named Zoe.  I’m a fifth grade teacher in Boca Raton, Florida, and have been teaching for 17 years.  I’m also a photographer, a reader, a jazz lover, a guy that likes to cycle for fun, a tennis player, and a lover of technology.  Having said that last part, I really have to qualify something.  I am not in possession of all of the latest and greatest technological marvels.  I am, however, a person that truly believes in the power of technology to enhance one’s productivity, increase and expand one’s creativity, and to motivate children to seek out the answers to all of their questions.

That’s where the name comes from.  Technology is so dynamic in that it, whatever kind you’re using, can do so many different things for you.  And digital, well, I thought that it went really well with dynamics!

In the future I hope to engage you with stories about my technology successes, and failures of course, so that you see how I use technologically personally and professionally.  And, I will be sure to include links and names of items that I find to be really cool, hopefully free, and easy to use.