I met Dan!

Whoo hoo!! Helen and I just got back from Beyond 4 Walls: Podcasting in Education, a conference in Dallas, Texas. The keynote was given by Dan Schmit who does Kidcast: Podcasting in the Classroom which was my own personal inspiration to begin podcasting. And who I called back in April or May to offer to help with the Where in the World geography podcast quiz. Before the conference began, Helen and I went to find and thank Maria Henderson for inviting us. And there was Dan! It was kind of… strange… recognizing a voice that I’d never spoken with and talking to someone I still felt I knew a bit from email correspondance and listening to his podcasts. Not a bad strange. Just a “gosh the world is flat” strange.

The keynote was awesome (and no, not just because he mentioned Where in the World and had my name up there on his Keynote for all the world conference attendees to see)! He promised to share his Keynote, but I was frantically typing everything he shared. There is now so much MORE I want to do with my kids now, and share with my teachers. I have a renewed energy and I didn’t think my energy was down to begin with! I think I’ll use the forums to share some of Dan’s ideas, so check it out!

After the keynote, Helen and I chose the breakout session about copyright and intellectual property given by none other than Wes Fryer! What a banner day for us! This session was much more interesting and informative than I realized it would be, and expectations were not low! Wow! Another long list of sites for us to check out, but but as importantly, we learned a lot about copyright laws, and creative commons. We’ll be podcasting about that shortly.

So after two great sessions, which made it totally worth us leaving our city at 4:30 in the morning to get there in time, Helen and I decided to brave asking both Dan and Wes if we could interview them for our podcast. We thought it would be short and sweet and only wrote down five questions to ask them. How can you say no to five little questions, right?

We cornered Wes Fryer first and he gractiously agreed to our interview. Whoo hoo! We got out our iPod and mic and began recording. We thought we’d get a couple of sentences per question and then we’d go on our merry way, but Wes had more to say. We got answers with some real substance. And then Wes pulled out his (borrowed) iRiver and interviewed us. I’d like to point out now that we gave Wes all of the questions before we actually recorded and interviewed but we had to answer on the fly. That’s my only excuse if we sound really lame if he decides to podcast any of our conversation. Anyway, look for Wes’ interview in a future episode of Tech Chick Tips. But wait, there’s more!

Dan agreed to an interview as well! This time, though, the three of us sat at a table and used the questions as a springboard and had more of a conversation than an interview. And that was more than we’d hoped for as well. So the same five questions with a very different flavor. That interview will be in episode 11 of Tech Chick Tips. (Dan was the keynote so his interview will be first – and besides, he won in rock, paper, scissors when we were deciding who’s interview would be in which episode.)

The conference was awesome – did I say that already? I’m multitasking right now, doing the techie stuff to get our next episode of the tips out. We podcast on the way home from the conference with me driving and Helen holding the laptop. No microphone so this is definitely not a production value episode. If you listen carefully you’ll hear me yelp just slightly as I nearly rear-ended someone on the highway. I do not recommend podcasting while driving. Anyway, episode 10 will be up at about the same time as this blog but it doesn’t actually cover the Beyond 4 Walls conference. It’s mostly a random sampling of thoughts from Tech Forum and things we’d planned to talk about anyway, but we couldn’t help but be influenced by B4W, too. But B4W will be more of episodes 11 and 12.

I guess I’ll close this post so I can work on the episode notes.

wesfryer danschmit techforumtx06