Sharing Resources for a Conference Presentation



When I go to a conference, I hate when someone hands me a sheet of paper with a list of links. What do I do with that paper? Usually, during the presentation, I will mark the sites on the paper that might be useful to me, my teachers, or my students. Then I have to bring the sheet of paper back home or to school and sit and type out all the URLs so that I can see if the sites really do interest me as something that I want to save. If I like what I see, then I save them in Diigo  and add lots of tags to each site so that I can find them again  at a later date. This is time consuming, and I have found that it may take me months to find the time to sit and go through all the websites. What a waste of time for me. I appreciate when you walk in to a conference session and are handed a paper or card with a link or QR code that points you to a website with all the resources that the presenter will discuss during their talk. I can open the resource site on my iPad during the session and decide their and then what sites are worth saving. I also know that I can go back to the link that the presenter shared with the audience. I save the presenter's resource list in my Diigo, and it is easy to go back and view and review at any time.

I have used Wikispaces many times to post my contact info and all the electronic resources that I share during a presentation. It is easy to create a wiki, but I never really use it fully. Though it is easy to make, it takes some time to flesh out and add the text.

Wiki I created in 2012
I have also used Slideshare successfully as a tool to house all the links for a presentation. By using Slideshare, attendees will get my presentation slides along with my links to resources. The downside to Slideshare is that you cannot add any links until the fourth slide.

This past October, I presented at a state conference for school librarians. I decided to submit the same presentation for our state conference for computer using educators called LACUE which is an affiliate of ISTE. On Tuesday, I will again be presenting: "Where Reading and the Web Collide." I reviewed my PowerPoint presentation and added a couple of new slides because I was short about 5 minutes when I initially made this presentation. Most of the 51 slides in this PowerPoint are screenshots of the various websites that I selected that support or enhance reading for students grades K-12. Instead of using Wikispaces for links to these resources, I created a Symbaloo. It was a breeze to edit the Symbaloo and add the links for the additional resources that I put in my presentation yesterday. It was so much faster to build a Symbaloo than  a wiki. Symbaloo doesn't allow any text, so all I need to do is put in the URL. It does take some work to make it look pretty with pictures, but I can get that done fairly quickly now that I have built so many different Symbaloos.

Symbaloo for Where Reading and the Web Collide
One downside of using Symbaloo is that there is no place for me to insert my contact info. That is an important piece because I have been contacted after speaking at conferences numerous times. I decided that by creating a personal page using About.me I could list all my contact info and social media connections that I want to share with those attending my talk. I could add the link to the Symbaloo just like I added all the other links. Creating that page and adding it to the Symbaloo solved a problem, and now I have a personal page that I can share in my email and in other presentations that I might make in the future.

My AboutMe Page

I just love technology. I like it for how it can teach problem solving and creativity. I like it because it means I can keep all learning in one place rather than have numerous paper files saved in a file cabinet that I will never open. By tagging all resources in Diigo, I can go back again and again to see what was shared with me at past conferences and conventions.

Let the learning begin! I am looking forward to finding new tidbits that I can incorporate into my school and library after attending LACUE next week,

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