Wetlands and Wikis

I just returned this evening from a trip to South Carolina with Mr. Anderson. We were there to meet with teachers and school heads from 16 different schools from all over the eastern half of the U.S. The event was sponsored by NCISR, which Whitfield helped to found back in the 1990's.

The keynote speaker was Alan November, and his remarks have me all fired up about blogging, RSS feeds, publishing student work, wikis, skype and lots of other cool things that my students knew about already, but which are kind of new to me.

South Carolina was my 42nd state. I had visited all the states in the eastern U.S. except SC and now I can focus on travelling west. My only remaining unvisited states are Washignton, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, the Dakotas, Alaska and Hawaii.

We had lots of rain during the conference, which was held at Kiawah Island, a barrier island along the Atlantic shore. While we spent a lot of time in meetings, I did get a chance to walk along the ocean and among the tidal ponds, where I saw Great Egrets, Blue Herons, a few Buffleheads, Sanderlings, Double-Crested Cormorants, Brown Pelicans and several spieces of gulls.

We didn't see any of the alligators rumored to be numerous in the freshwater on the backside of the island.

I would like to return to South Carolina to do some more extensive bird watching with Mrs. Hays some day.