Yay, somebody is reading!

I do feel a little like I'm talking to myself here on this blog. Which is fine, because I started it as a place to be reflective about what I am doing with literacy and technology in my classroom.

However, on September 18, I got a message from screencast that I had exceeded my bandwidth for the month for my Jing files. On the 18th! Lots of month left after the 18th. This has never happened before and it worried me because I had just uploaded a video to show the new sixth graders. Ironically, the topic of my jing dealt with file compression. I wanted to show students how to compress their photographs before they inserted them into other documents. I wanted to make the video so that I can refer students to it repeatedly since reminders for 11 year olds are, well, essential!

At first, I thought that the new jing was the one that put me over the limit. I tweeted out an "oh no" just because I'm trying to remember to twitter my ed tech life a little more. Dave McCollom from Techsmith saw my tweet, contacted me, found my account before I had a chance to answer and upped my bandwidth allotment! Wow!

Now, I have no connection to Techsmith at all except as a customer (and I do have a paid for copy of Camtasia that I don't use), but now I am an even bigger fan than I was before. The whole scenario is a great example of 21st century marketing (which doesn't actually interest me that much as an educator, but does as a customer) which my classmate Jim Tobin would be interested in. Techsmith met my need as a customer without me having to ask for "technical support."

When I tweeted a little more with Dave, he sent me a message " If you want to dig a little deeper and see where your bandwidth is going check this out." He made me a jing showing me that it was actually my blog post on Jing vs Camtasia that was generating the traffic to my screencast account (which is where the Jingproject videos get posted). That made me feel good about my blog, maybe it is occasionally helpful for people. It made me feel even more positive about Dave and Techsmith that he would take the trouble to help me out so much with what is a free application and hosting service.

This video by David Truss does a nice job of communicating the power of networking for educators. Dave is much, much more connected than I am, and I'm not comparing myself to him by any means. His video inspired me to keep working on my PLN though!



PS While I'm writing this, I'm listening to EdTechTalk Weekly and have my Facebook and Twitter streams up. Did I mention looking for my attention span lately?