I enjoyed the presentations that I attended at the ECOO conference for the most part today and hopefully those who attended my session on RSS took back some ideas. 

I had a fairly crowded room with about 60 educators who seemed very interested in RSS.  I had an interesting question relating to the immediacy of rss feeds and their use for instructional purposes, since they are not hosted locally if the site is down your lesson is shot.  But, like everything in teaching (especially online), you always need a backup plan.  I will post a more detailed outline of the RSS presentation for feedback soon and if I can get my act together, I will screencast it.

The first session I attended was "Expedition Everest – Connecting Students to the Top of the World" by Shawn Allen a Secondary IT Consultant for Ottawa-Carleton DSB was great.  It was amazing to see this project.

Summary:
OCDSB became a sponsor of an Mt. Everest expedition team, with a number of other sponsors.  Educators worked for a week to create lesson connections for the expedition and embed it in their curriculum.  Six high schools used videoconferences, photos, online chats, Blackboard LMS, and recorded audio chats to collaborate with the climbers. This project went so well that Expedition Africa http://www.africa.ocdsb.ca/is being planned for the fall.  The media from the project is archived at http://www.everest.ocdsb.ca/ Shawn also has a post on the session on his Video Conferencing in Education blog. 

The second session was on "Podcasting" by Robert Karulas from the Toronto DSB.  

Summary:
This session was an overview of podcasting with specific attention paid to pedagogy.  Robert is planning to post a podcast of the entire session on his new blog  so I won't go into any more detail.  There is also recent discussions at Toronto District School board on Podcasting Collaborative Learning Community blog.

The final session that I attended today at the end of the day was horrible and I will not mention it or give a summary of it.  I wouldn't want to insult anyone, since there needed to be a little quaility control at that presentation.