Thursday (written on Friday)

I actually did try to post yesterday, but there was an error #!&*# and everything was lost. :-(

I started out the day with a 2-hour stint at the EV as a greeter, my favorite role there because it puts me right in the path of webheads and others entering the room.  I get to reconnect with a lot of people that way. After that I came back to the hotel (happily just 3 minutes' walk from the Convention Center) to pick up Dennis' beautiful red roses.  I took the roses, in their box, back to the CC just in time for Evelyn Izquierdo's presentation on "Powerful Web 2.0 Tools for the ELT Classroom"--only Evelyn was not there! Jane Petring and I waited for a while and then went down the hall to see fellow webhead Laine Marshall present "Designing Successful Projects for ELLS with Limited/Interrupted Education". When that was finished I checked back at Evelyn's room to find that she had arrived and was giving her presentation as best she could with a frozen computer (Murphy's Law)! It was the first time for me to meet Evelyn f2f and it was a special pleasure because I learned so much from her in this year's EVO session, "Podcasting for the ESL-EFL Classroom".

After the presentation, Evelyn and I went with Vance looking for a sandwich shop. It turned out to be a kind of serial lunch. Vance got his sandwich and had to race back to the CC for a 1:00 session. I got my sandwich (grilled cheese on white--New Orleans is NOT a good town for vegetarians!) and ate it while Evelyn waited for her sandwich, which finally arrived when I had finished mine.

The weather is just beautiful, in the low eighties F and sunny, so it was lovely to be outside.

At 2:00 Veronica and I went to Claire's session on "Building the Right Scaffolding for Writing", which was really more on her project for an ESL online writing lab, ESLWOW (handout at http://edvista.com/claire/pres/scaffolding.html ).

Following that at 3:00 we both had tickets to Vance Stevens' Mini-Workshop at the EV, "Collaborative Writing Using Google Docs and Tagging in Delicious."  This was very useful because I learned how to publish a google doc and how to search Delicious for other people's bookmarks, features I was unaware of although I have been using both applications for several years.

I was not feeling well, so I came back to the room to rest a bit before dinner but made the mistake of turning on my computer, so I did not rest, blogged instead but as I mentioned above lost the post anyway. Went back to the CALL-IS business meeting and then a group of webhead women (Claire, Veronica, Jane, Laine, Mary and I) and 1 friend (Dorinda) made use of a reservation at Cochon, a Cajun restaurant around the corner from the Springhill Suites. Again, not a stellar choice for a vegetarian (LOTS of pork, some seafood) but the atmosphere was great, the service attentive if slow, and the food delicious (I had a baked potato and a salad and shared a decadent double chocolate pudding cake). At ten, straight back to the hotel and slept nine hours.