The days of sit-and-git for me are over.  I am so tired of sitting in a room and listening to someone talk .  Today I drove to Regina to attend Bringing Learning to Life - Preparing Students for Success which was sponsored by Apple.  Yesterday I met with the same Apple representatives along with various people I work with.  We are entertaining the thought of purchasing of Apple laptops for schools.  Anyways the people running the day lectured the entire day – didn’t bring anything to life for me!  Luckily WiFi was available so I did as much work as possible.  When I attend a meeting I want to be ENGAGED.  I looked around the room and I am in awe of the people - the knowledge - the experience.  Let's talk.  I got more out of my day connecting with my colleagues at lunch than I did from Apple.  I can't believe that Apple would run something like this.  The Apple people are great and very knowledgeable and I look forward to working with them; however running a conference with a room full of IT professionals they have a lot to learn about.  We could have accomplished so much by structuring the day allowing people to interact and engage in dialogue. 

After lunch a group of us went to the restaurant at the hotel and started talking about technology, learning and many other educational issues.  There were a few ideas I took away and one I will follow up on .  We need a central portal for our province.  I envision this portal being a collection of xml feeds from the school divisions. 

In our school division we have school websites that publish stories using Joomla open source CMS.  These stories use XML technology.  I plan to build categories into the school sites such as Math, Science, Assessment, E-learning opportunities ….  Each of these school feeds can then be aggregated into the division website.  NO overhead or maintenance because the content is derived from the divisions websites.  Go to the math page on the division website and you will find math related stories for the schools.  If we could then publish this feed on a provincial portal I could then read about all the math stories around the province.  Do this for all areas and you have a very powerful tool to connect teachers.  Tie in a very good search engine and then you have something.  If every division uses a CMS that has the ability to create different XML feeds then this can be a reality.  I would like to see a provincial Joomla project – then build in a forum at a provincial level.  Right now our provincial forum area is not really a forum it’s a bulletin board within Blackboard which in my opinion is useless.  Why is it useless?  Because when someone responds to my post I am not notified in email.  I need to return and read the bulletin board to see if someone has responded – waste of time.  I don’t know why this hasn’t been addressed.  I am sure Blackboard has this built in; however the provincial server/software has not been upgraded.  Anyways I digress – we need a provincial portal and it needs to be tied to division websites.