Academic Aesthetic Podcast 76

In today's podcast, I talk about Steve Dembo's presentation on "Office 2.0."

Last night I slept in my own bed - something I hadn't done since a week ago, thanks to a trip to Pennsylvania to see my father-in-law and attend the Northeast Regional DEN event.

Yes, I know I've been talking about it a lot, recently, but any time you have 50 educators from 8 different states getting together to learn about technology integration I feel that I can't say enough.

Will Richardson wasn't the only big name presenting at the event this week. We also had Steve Dembo ... more or less.

Steve presented through the use of Vyew.com, a free website that lets you do live presentations over the internet. I'll admit it had some minor bugs, but with us communicating back and forth via Skype (I don't think Vyew supports voice) it still had more than enough bandwidth to work decently.

Mr. Dembo's workshop was all about what he called "Office 2.0," which I thought would refer to OpenOffice.org, a free alternative to Microsoft Office that just recently reached version 2.0.

I was wrong.

Steve did give us free alternatives to Microsoft Office, but also for Photoshop and iMovie. The most notable thing about his alternatives was that they weren't programs - they were all websites!

Having a website with the functionality of a desktop program opens a lot of doors. I've been in many buildings where the computers weren't powerful enough to handle Adobe Photoshop, but did have enough RAM to load an image editing website. Add to that the possibility of remote storage and collaborations with schools across the country and across the world just got a whole lot easier.

Sound interesting? well you're in luck, because Steve put all of his links on the DEN North East Event wiki's Workshops section.

That's all for now, so if you don't mind I'm going to go edit some video.

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