I just got this email in from ULearn07 organising committee. I really lashed out this year and volunteered to facilitate a couple of sessions and was accepted for both.

The ULearn07 Conference programme committee are pleased to inform you that your workshop/presentations entitled “Getting connected globally with podcasting” and “Adding bling to your blog” have been accepted.

Details such as room and breakout allocations will be available on the Ulearn website under the presenters tab www.ulearn.org.nz within the next two weeks.

I am looking forward to flying up to Auckland in the school holidays (3-5 October) with other members of our Waimea-South ICT cluster to the conference at the Skytower and hearing Ewan McIntosh keynoting F2F. It will be a shame that I won’t be getting paid to be there though. I am the taking ten weeks of Term Three as leave without pay to care for my mum who has just last week been diagnosed as having Parkinson’s Disease. As I am not getting paid for the pupil contact time I am also not getting paid for the non-pupil contact time! Mum is booked to be our cluster mascot at the conference but we will have to see how it goes. We spent this morning having ultra-sound and ECG scans at the hospital. Again where would we be without the use of technology- we were lucky enough to get the brand new ultra-sound machine that played Star Wars like lazar sounds as it captured frames! Mum was unimpressed- I thought it was very cool!

Being the  digital native that Marc Prensky thinks I’m not the internet has been a vast pool of information about Parkinson’s Disease, its symptoms, diagnosis and treatments. Knowing what we are up against is better than not knowing- and ‘just in time’ learning is what was needed.

With ten weeks to craft my presentations I am sure they will be just fab (Paul Harrington). Looking forward to networking with y’all (David Warlick) if you can make it.