Tuesday, June 27, 2023
Pay to Play?
Sunday, May 7, 2023
Learning from Attendees While Presenting
After introducing myself to the whole group, I took the opportunity to start with a language demonstration of using Microsoft Translator to collaborate with a global network. I told them of my experience working on a global team for E2 and that while we didn't speak the same language we were able to present together. This was my way of showing that if they were more comfortable speaking Arabic, as the minority in the situation I was willing to communicate in their language.
Disclaimer: This blog post is my personal reflection to a training I completed on behalf of my employer. However the post is my own experiences and opinions. It does not reflect my employer.
Wednesday, January 11, 2023
What's in a brand?
Tuesday, July 5, 2022
Reflections From New Orleans (ISTE 2022)
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Otis hanging out in Minecraft |
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Time to present my session. |
Disclaimer: My attendance at ISTE'22 was covered by my employer. However this post is my personal opinion and does not reflect my employer.
Wednesday, March 30, 2022
Language Barriers, Time Zone Challenges, and More Lessons from E2
Two years ago, I was selected to attend the Education Exchange (E2) in Australia but prior to going, the conference was delayed and then canceled. Now, in 2022, E2 has gone virtual. While it means I don't get to travel to Australia (yet) it also means that I had an amazing opportunity. I was selected to be part of a team of four to present one of the breakout sessions.
Sadly, one of our four team members never responded to emails so we ended up a team of three. But we were a magnificent team of three. That is of course once we finally got started. That was one of the major lessons I learned from this experience. All three of us were located in different time countries (United States, South Africa, and Viatnam) which meant three time zones and two languages.
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Our team |
This experience was a great learning experience and I look forward to when E2 is held in person again.
Monday, March 7, 2022
Spam Filter Enabled
This is a little sad, but I had to turn on comment moderation for my blog. As of right now, I don't get many comments on posts here, but within the last week I had over half my posts, new and old, receive random comments. All filled with text about online casinos and hyperlinks to... I don't know, I didn't click the links.
I deleted the comments and felt it necessary to turn on comment moderation. This means that if you would like to comment on one of my posts, I will get an email and need to manually approve the comment. I want everyone to comment on my blog even if they disagree with me, but I need to prevent these spam posts. I promise that as long as your comment is related to the blog I will approve it to be displayed, even if I disagree with you. The only comments I will ignore are ones such as those casino spamming comments.
I have a feeling these spammers are trying to build their SEO by having random websites link back to their site. What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization. I only am beginning to understand marketing and SEOs as I've taken a bunch of courses through LinkedIn Learning and HubSpot. The basics and what I believe the unfortunate purpose of these spam comments is that search engines such as Google and Bing rank sites based on their validity and popularity. Therefore, if more people link to a site it improves that site's ranking on the search engine. Links for ranking purposes must come from external sites. For example, if I link this post to a previous post, that won't affect either post's ranking because they are internal links.
Page 3 of a Google search |
Thursday, February 10, 2022
In Person Again, FETC 2022
Figment of my imagination. |
My trip to FETC began with a day where Murphy's Law ruled. The entire morning represented the expression "whatever can go wrong, will go wrong" but eventually I arrived at the airport and checked-in for my flight. When I landed in Orlando, I knew everything was looking up when Figment greeted me at the airport. You don't know Figment? He's the underappreciated mascot of Epcot, a Figment of my Imagination. Eventually, I arrived at the hotel and made a plan for the next day.
Day 1 (False Start)
MIEExpert Road2E2 jackets seen in the wild. |
One thing I learned, a little too late, is that the first day of FETC is all premium workshops. This means that you needed to register and pay for a premium registration to attend. Therefore, after I checked in and got my nametag, there wasn't anything for me to do. So what did I do? I spent the day relaxing and maybe I did a little shopping.
Before long, it was time to meet up with my MIEExpert family for dinner and a reunion. Our dinner lasted so long it was amazing the restaurant didn't kick us out. Not only was it the MIEEs, but we were joined by the awesome teams of Flipgrid and Wakelet as we all caught up on two years.
I not only reunited with friends and peers. I also made new friends and connections.
Day 2 (The Real Start)
Wednesday morning revealed the true FETC beginning. I started my morning by trying to attend a session on making professional development engaging but it was standing room only so I ended up leaving. Made my way over to Microsoft's room and found that was standing room only also, but there was enough room near the door that I stayed to listen to Leslie Fisher talk about Teams and OneNote.
Collage from the expo hall. |
I spent a good amount of the day in the expo hall learning about new products and features of products I already knew before trying to attend a few other sessions. One thing I will say about FETC is that because it was the first in-person conference and because I was really nervous about being in crowds I missed out on a bunch of sessions I wanted to attend because they were all popular.
Wednesday night, I was invited to an event hosted by Nearpod and it did not disappoint. I am not part of Nearpod's PioNear program like I am with Microsoft's MIEE program, but they welcomed me at their dinner anyway and made me feel like family.
Day 3
Day three started with another Keynote and more networking. In the afternoon, it was my turn to present a session on Digital Whiteboarding. My session was scheduled for one of the mini theaters in the expo hall which was great because tons of people were stopping to watch for a few minutes between checking out the vendors.
A Canva template. |
Murphy's Law reared its ugly head again as I had a lot of wifi issues during my session. Luckily, Microsoft Whiteboard is not 100% cloud-based so while I couldn't demo the cloud and collaboration, I was able to demonstrate the Windows 10 whiteboarding app. While the cloud was not cooperating, I did have my slide deck in PowerPoint so I was able to also show screenshots and discuss some pedagogy including the awesome templates on Canva.
After the Conference
Miami Beach |
Disclaimer: As a Microsoft Innovative Education Expert (MIEE), I was fortunate to have my registration and travel covered by Microsoft as a presenter using Microsoft tools.