stevedembo

ISTE is What You Make of It

Posted by Dean Shareski on in Conferences, digital stories, techlearning 1 Comment

Cross posted at Tech & Learning

After attending my 5th ISTE event in a row, I always enjoy reading various reflections of the event. Those reflections usually reference the opportunity to network with other educators. The proverbial, “the hallway conversations trump sessions” statement continues to be the theme of the posts made by your favorite bloggers.  Of course, one must realize the bias of what you read online. Those who blog and tweet are those who have, and find value, in a networked community of learners. Most of these folks are pretty empowered to pick and choose sessions in balance with informal time with colleagues. They’re the ones that try and make it back year after year not because they think they’ll be blown away by something amazing or new but because they treasure the opportunity to reunite with colleagues and friends.  It’s summer camp for educators.

This year I tried to pay attention to those not so well connected, those who have never sent a tweet or might not know what “PLN” stands for. In the hands on session that Steve and I did for example,  I met a principal who shared that he came to ISTE to understand
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I like it when things just work

Posted by Dean Shareski on in rants 7 Comments

It’s been about two weeks since I moved hosting companies and I must say it was one of the best moves I ever made.

I’ve been hosting domains as a reseller and for personal use for about 4 years and although I’ve never really understood all the mumbo jumbo involved with DNS, the datbases and pinging and so forth, I was confident that my hard earn dollars would provide me with the support necessary to use the services.

I decided to go with a Canadian company so I chose webserve. Not having anything to
compare it to, I was content with the service. Questions were usually answered via live chat and downtime was minimal. In 4 years I might have had my sites go down 5 times and never more than a few hours. This fall things changed. My server was constantly going down and worst of all support was non-existent. I spent hours trying to get a hold of anyone who could at least provide me with some comfort let alone a fix. It’s a helpless feeling when others are calling you about something you’re responsible for but can do nothing about it. The only responses were canned … Read the rest