Fun with Chuck

Well…I know you have been waiting to hear about the ACEware users' convention, so here we go.

If your campus uses ACEware Student Manager you should make plans to attend. Each even year ACEware holds a national conference and on the odd years they hold regional meetings. At this conference we got to meet just about all of the gang. I had the pleasure of having dinner seating with Lauri Thompson & her husband as well as Michael and Daniel who are two of the techs. We had a preconference as well as two days of enjoyable training. I presented on custom reports. Another enjoyable part of the conference was meeting users from other campuses across the country..in addition to Ohio representatives Renee from Akron and Tally from Washington State. We found that North Dakota has an interesting Workforce Development system. Visit their website at http://www.trainnd.com/. You are probably wondering if there are pictures, http://www.aceware.com/Events/08conference.shtml and see if you can find me. (I will have my pictures with me at the next IT round table!)

 

We have an ACEware users meeting coming up, so please let Tina or I know what topics you would like us to bring up at this meeting or add it as a comment here. Also, thank you to Lakeland for their hospitality this month. A group of us went there to work with them on their Student Manager rollout. They asked tough but important questions and all in all it was a productive day. If you are interested in localized customized training on your Student Manager contact Tina Trombley.

Geek Speak

Found another interesting website the other day. http://Geekspeakr.com is a website that lists women who speak on technology based topics. From the site: "Many organisers of technical conferences, meetups, and dinners want to have more gender-balance in their lineups, but they don't know where to find technical women speakers.

Enter geekspeakr.com, a simple directory and connections system to help technical women speakers and event organisers to find each other."

As you can see by the wording this is non-US specific. And yes, I of course had to register on it. It appears that it is still in beta and they are accepting applications. It has a simple search engine to find speakers by topic. I heard of this through a listserv I subscribe to called "WikiChix" a listserv for women interested in Wikis. Another site they mention that I have yet to check out is http://www.socialtext.net/speakers/index.cgi?the_speaker_s_wiki.

What interesting website have you stumbled upon this week?

In Plain English

Got an email today about an interesting video series. The "In Plain English" series is from Common Craft and provides a simplified way of looking at a variety of topics. The series includes:

Social Networking In Plain English
Twitter in Plain English
RSS In Plain English
Online Photo Sharing in Plain English

Check them out at www.commoncraft.com or on Youtube! You just might see one of these videos coming soon to a webinar near you.

What other fun teaching tools have you found lately?

Your Topics Please

EnterpriseOhio Network has just released their call for proposals for this fall's convention. "The Next Frontier" convention will be held October 28-30 at the Embassy Suites in Dublin. Please let us know what IT topics you would like to see presented. We plan on having the roundtable again and could also sponsor a session or two if you have something of interest.

A few topics I thought of:

Marketing Technical Programs
Office Productivity Tools can be Free (focus on using OpenOffice, Google Docs, etc)
ACEware Student Manager topics

Let us know what you would like to see.