Initial Thoughts About NECC 2007 in Atlanta

First, Wow! I've spent the last two days feeling overwhelmed and humbled by all the technology innovation I've seen going on here at NECC in Atlanta. I thought CUE was great, but this conference has blown me away. I started late and missed the first big day of the conference, so I needed a day to get oriented. I went to the keynote on Tuesday, which was great (most of the highlights you can get by going to the NECC website). A lot of the conference handouts are available online, and many of the sessions were podcast.
The rest of Tuesday, I spent wandering around the exhibits and the conference center. An interesting thing happened while wandering. I had been disappointed searching the conference website initially for sessions related to special education. Well, while wandering, I happened upon an area tucked away, called "The Playground", that had several tables set up with information on accessibility. Through discussion with one very enthusiastic young tech person from Florida, I found out that I had been using the wrong term for searching. I should have been looking under Universal Design. In my next post, I'll be writing more on the fascinating information I learned about Universal Design, which actually focuses on diverse learners of every kind. I have a lot of links to share, but today, I'll just give this one: Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Design for Learning. This is a book that you can purchase, but is available online to read, as well.
One more link I want to share today, for anyone who'd like to get started learning more about Web 2.0 with an emphasis on Universal Design. It's called 90 Days of Summer, and is a calendar of links, one a day, to start exploring. Get started on this, and I'll have more links later!