Monday, February 23, 2009

ManACE March TIN: The Next Steps...

Please join us on March 11th, 2009:
3 sessions + dinner = $5

Why not?


Diigo - Develop / Expand your PLN
Presented by: Phil Taylor
Did you miss 'Getting Connected' at the end of January? John Evans & Andy McKiel, hosted a wonderful hands-on session on two social networking tools, Twitter & Diigo. This TIN session will explore some of the powerful features of Diigo from a new user perspective. Diigo is an exciting social bookmarking tool to develop/expand your presonal learning network. Diigo offers two services in one: a research and collaborative research, and a knowledge tool with a focus on sharing community and social content.

Google Apps Education Edition
Presented by: Shawn Kleebaum
Ask not what you can do for Google but what Google Apps can do for you! Google Apps Education Edition offers free communication, collaboration and publishing tools, including email accounts on your school's domain. Google Apps Education Edition includes Start Page, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sites, and Google Docs. You can select any combination of the available tools and services and customise them with your school's logo, colour scheme and content. Manage your users through a web-based control panel. Best of all, it's all hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software to download, install or maintain. This session will demonstrate the benefits of getting started with Google Apps Education Edition.

MARVIN - Bringing Your Stories To Life
Presented by: Steve Dudar
Marvin is an award winning training, education and presentation authoring application using 3D Avatars to communicate important information and stories to audiences. Marvin uses a multi-sensory approach, integrating real voice, computer generated voice, written text, images, video and PowerPoint presentations to quickly create presentations that reflect cultural, lingual and social attributes of the audience. This demonstration will show how easy it is to create basic Marvin scripts, change the language and the character in order to customize the message for the audience.

When?
Wednesday, March 11th @ 5:30 p.m.

Where?
Ecole Robert H. Smith
315 Oak Street, Winnipeg
*click here for the location and directions*

Cost?
$5.00, to cover the cost of dinner (pizza and salad)

How do I register?
E-mail: andy@mckiel.ca
*please register ASAP so that we can plan accordingly*

We hope to see you at our upcoming TIN :-)

Friday, February 20, 2009

Upcoming Events...

It's a busy time of the year, with many technology workshops and conferences taking place across the province. We're just a week away from Minnedosa's annual BYTE Conference, and there are several other major conferences on the horizon, including Riding The Wave (in Gimli) and the MaDLAT Conference (in Winnipeg).

ManACE is pleased to offer a host of workshops and sessions throughout the next few months. Mark your calendars for our next Winnipeg TIN, taking place the evening of March 11th. Details about the presentations will follow before the end of February. ManACE is also planning to host a second March TIN in Brandon. Details will be posted here to the blog and distributed through the ManACE mailing list when available. If you're not currently subscribed to our mailing list, you can sign up for our mailing list now :-)

Thanks to the positive response to our 'Getting Connected' event held at the end of January, ManACE is planning a series of follow-up events to assist Manitoba educators with continuing the journey of getting connected with their own professional learning networks. Participants in our January 29th event found the focused play time with Twitter and Diigo to be very useful in beginning the journey to get connected to like-minded educators. Visit the wiki that was used for our session to access some of the resources that were shared.

Another opportunity worth noting is the upcoming 'Game On Manitoba' conference. Click on the following link to view and share a .pdf with details of this event:


Lastly, the Board of ManACE is working toward offering several 'Winter Workshops' (...or Spring Workshops) this year. If you have any suggestions for topics that you'd like to see included, please feel free to share them through comments to this blog post :-)

Feel free to leave us a note,
Andy