tt4t_091 NECC bound and loaded for learning

It’s Friday, June 26th, 2009 and welcome to episode 91 of TechTalk4Teachers, I’m Tom Grissom. This weeks episode is a short one as I am in the process of heading out to the National Educational Computing Conference in Washington, DC better known as NECC that will be taking place next week.

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NECC is one of those conferences that I try to make it to at least every other year as it is focused on educational technology at the K-12 level. Since EIU is a teacher preparation institution this conference allows me the chance to connect with others from all around the world in person and share our experiences with one another. The conference has a huge vendor area as well as a large number of sessions provided by practicing K-12 teachers.

If you would like to experience some of the conference with me and other attendees you can follow me on my Twitter account, twitter.com/tomgrissom, you can also search for the #NECC09 hash tag as many people attending this conference will mark their tweets with this tag. I spend as much time outside of sessions as I do sitting in sessions as there are always informal meet-ups that occur at this conference. Twitter allows me and others to get instant updates that often lead to informal sharing of ed tech experiences. If you are attending NECC and would like to meet in person send me a Direct Message (DM) and we will see if we can get together in DC.

Technology Pick of the Week


My Technology Pick of the Week this week is a fun photoediting website that allows you to easily produce creative effects in your photos using Web 2.0 technology. The name of the site is befunky and a link is available in the show notes.

befunky – creative photo effects
http://www.befunky.com/

This site is very easy to use and you do not need an account to begin using it. You can browse photos on your computer and upload them to befunky and then it as easy as selecting the special effect you would like applied to your photo. Special effects include cartoonizer, inkify, charcoal, scribbler, and sunburst to name a few.

Checkout the befunky special effects at:
http://www.befunky.com/photoApps.php#

This site makes it easy to be creative and produce some nice looking artwork all at the click of a mouse. Even folks like myself that are not that artistic can produce some amazing artwork. Give befunky a try and let me know what you think.

That wraps it up for episode 91 of TechTalk4Teachers. Transcripts and show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the Eastern Illinois University Instructional Technology Center website at www.eiu.edu/itc just click on the Techtalk4Teachers Podcast link. If you have questions, comments or suggestions please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the TechTalk4Teachers blog. Until next time, this is Tom Grissom, keep on learning.