Late to the party...

It has been a few months since I missed out on the meetings in which you guys accomplished so much in San Marcos/Wimberley, but now that life has slowed down, I want to catch up and join the party! Colleen, your podcast page is awesome - we will definitely be borrowing if you don't mind.
Here is what is happening in San Marcos & Round Rock (CTWP): we have expanded to a 4 person tech team to better cover the needs of 2 locations. We've introduced the e-anthology and a wordpress blog that will be used for the daily log and other discussions. We will also have an advanced and open institute in August & July for digital storytelling led by Laise one of our tech team.
We've got some other project in the works, more details to come.

Audacity/Podcast

Tomorrow is my podcast training. Here are some helpful links and ideas for podcasting.


If you have any more ideas for podcasting let me know and I'll add them to my list!

Publish on Demand

As your Summer Institutes begins, one option to consider is jazzing up your anthology by using a Publish-on-Demand site.  We tried this last year and were pretty happy with the results.  Our anthology went from a spiral packet that looked very much like it was run off on a photocopy machine to a trade paper-back bound book with a glossy cover.  Since last year, I've learned a few tricks (the main trick being actually using Acrobat) that I think will make this year's product even better by letting me export files form Apple's Pages program.  

We used lulu.com to publish our anthology.  The advantage to lulu is price.  You can pay copy-by-copy and there are no set-up fees.  You just upload a file (the document can even be in Word format) and viola!  However, you can also spruce up the cover with an image of your own.  Heck, you can go to full glossy photo pages inside too--but I doubt any of our sites have that sort of anthology budget.  

You can check out the order page for ours at lulu:

WTWP 2007 Anthology by Richard Helmling, Alison Zapeda, Cheryl Patterson, Daniel Skertchly, Dory Munder, Gyneth Garrison, Jonna Perrillo, Joy Baggett, Manuel Aldaco, Melissa Madrid, Vivian Maguire (Book) in Literature & Fiction

By the way, I'm listed first because it's my lulu account, not because I'm a vainglorious fiend intent on robbing the spotlight from my fellows.  No, really...I swear.

Summer Institute Beginnings!

We started our SI today! I have our wiki all set up: http://northstaroftexas.wikispaces.com/
(Note the "2008 Summer Institute fun" under "Cool Links". I'm setting up play rooms to teach them how to use the wiki!)I really wanted to use Googlesites, but it has too many problems getting through the school filter. I also want to change our logo, so don't laugh at it!

The Wiki makes me feel like I've become an important historian who is documenting all that goes on at a Summer Institute. It's pretty cool.

Lesson ideas:
Instead of making everyone do every tech lesson, I'm going to try a new approach. I will still have them all learn how to use the wiki (although I set up their pages for them) and the E-Anthology, but the other lessons people will sign up for! I'm going to have break out sessions during research time each week to meet the needs of the fellows. My lessons are coming straight from the survey, they want help with blogs, wikis, photo story, etc. Fellows will sign up and come learn about what they are interested in. This way I'm not teaching someone who barely checks their email how to blog!

Do you think I'm enabling them too much?

C