The exciting education technology conference (PAETC) that took place last week at Haverford College is making its way to the web in the form of a blog linking to podcasts and screencasts of the presentations. I heard that there were some technical difficulties recording a couple of presentations, but some of the presentations are being posted, including John Dehlin’s, on OpenCourseWare, and mine, a 25-minute talk on optimizing classroom blogs for search engines. There’s a lot of information there not only for classroom blogs but also for blogs in general, and there are tips for optimizing both new and existing blogs. (Will you let me know what you think of some of my suggestions?) Thanks to Jean-Claude Bradley for posting these resources.

Presenting entirely from a blog, which I did that day, definitely has its advantages. (This time I set up pages within WordPress.) I didn’t have optimal screencasting software loaded on my laptop, but the organizers wanted to capture the presentation as a screencast, so I borrowed Jean-Claude’s notebook, connected to the Internet for the presentation, and away we went (no files to copy over!). Still, blogs aren’t ideal as the basis for a presentation. It’s tricky to get the formatting exactly the way you want it (using PowerPoint can definitely spoil you.)

It seems like there is opportunity for someone to come along and create web-based presentation software that will come close to offering the best of all worlds. Perhaps it’s out there and I just haven’t come across it. Have you?