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22 December 2010

Get a Handle on RootsTech Classes


I’ve been looking over the list of classes, presentations and other activities scheduled for the RootsTech conference coming up in February 2011. And if you are wondering whether you might benefit from the conference or not, I have put together a little grouping of classes based on what your interests are.

I look at the long lists of classes offered and really dislike having to sort through them to determine what might be of interest to me. Even a bigger issue is trying to figure out what the class might be about because of the creativity in naming classes. Maybe this will be of help to you. Invariably some classes will change and others will be incorrectly categorized but this list should give you a little better idea of what to expect.

Graphics - Photography
Are you a graphics designer (see the techie classes listed at the end), a closet photographer, or have you been gathering family photo’s and not quite sure what to do with them. Maybe you just need to brush up on your skills or learn some new techniques. If so, take a look at some of the offerings for both techies and genealogists in the field of graphics and photography. Skill levels are listed unless they are for all attendees.

-       Digitally Preserving Your Family Heritage
-       Geocoding Your Images
-       Advanced Photography Brings Ancestors to Life
-       Using Your Digital Camera to Copy Records

Web design and genealogy blogs/newsletters:
Do you have your own website and want to add some new spark? Are you a blogger and want to expand your publishing skills? Maybe you want to start a newsletter. Then check out the following classes.

-       Easy Digital Newsletters
-       Genealogy Blogs: Impact and Influence in the Genealogy Community
-       Using the internet to create family websites
-       Rapid Family Tree Client Creation Using Genealogy Cloud™
-       Self-Publishing for Genealogists and Genealogical Societies
-       Beginner to intermediate: Creating Faster Websites
-       Intermediate: Web Analytics: Measure and Improve

Reference – Research:
There is a large group of classes that will enhance your research skills online and provide you with tools and reference material to make your genealogy experience even better.

 -       Create your own Family Reference Library and Catalogue
-       The Fifty Most Popular Genealogy Websites (Really!)
-       Effective Database Search Tactics
-       Tech Tools for Finding Manuscript Sources
-       Cool Tools to Enhance Your Online Research
-       Leverage Google's Free Services
-       One-Step Web pages: A Potpourri of Genealogical Search Tools
-       It's in Our Genes: Revealing History via Technology (A DNA Project Case Study)
-       Creating One-Step Search Tools
-       Collaborating with Genealogists to Redesign a Digital Library
-       FamilySearch: Providing Genealogy Help Now and in the Future
-       Finding Your Family's Stories Online
-       Google News and Timeline
-       Guidance to Online Federal Land Records
-       Library Digitization: Genealogists’ Dreams Come True
-       21st century immigrant clusters
-       Google Your Family Tree - Part 1and 2
-       What Can I Find Online: An Interactive Case Study
-       From DNA to Genetic Genealogy: Everything You Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask
-       How Should We Handle Sources
-       Zooming In on Townships
-       Accessing Online Federal Land Records and Plotting them on Google Earth
-       Getting More from Google

Electronic Devices and Media:
 I’ll bet you already have or you are getting a new iphone, Android, ipad, or other digital device  for Christmas this year. Want to learn more about them and what they can do for your genealogy? Check out these classes.

-       Best Uses of Mobile Devices
-       Toy Story – Electronic tools for genealogists
-       Mobile Apps for Genealogy
-       Using your Android Phone for Genealogy and Family History

Digital Media:
Then again maybe you want to do all your work online without using a device, or your are interested in getting records available online, or maybe you just want to know whether the digital you have will survive. Classes to attend will fall in this category.

-       Will Your Work Survive the Digital Age
-       Virtual Presentations Roundtable
-       Is the future of genealogy in the Cloud, on your phone or on the desktop?
-       Digitization of Irish Records
 

Societies and  Groups:
There are even a few classes that will help those who run a genealogical society.

-       Internet Indexing for Societies and Groups
-       Self-Publishing for Genealogists and Genealogical Societies

Software:
We all use software in our genealogy endeavors. Here are some good old standards as well as some new software and tools to stretch your winks on.

-       RootsMagic: Sharing and Publishing Your Family Tree
-       New FamilySearch Made Easy with Ancestral Quest: Syncing both PAF and AQ Data with NFS
-       Stop Wasting Time with NFS: Better Practices to Improve Your Time Online
-       Personal Historian
-       The Power of PDF: Tools for Every Genealogist
-       Software Forecast: What Genealogists Need for the Future
-       NA:  Census Extract (Program)
-       Text to speech/Speech to text recognition
-       Freeware and Shareware for Family History
-       Why and What is Wikitext?
-       NA: Why Are There Two Aunt Sally’s? Using GenMerge and GenMergeDB to find and resolve duplicates in family data.
-       Lights, Camera, Action!
-       PARTs 1 and 2: PowerPoint 2010 for Presenters (two hour lab)
-       Names in Stone (cemetery mapping)

Social Media:
Have you been a little apprehensive about using social media online? Not sure what it will do for you? Well besides being fun you can learn a tremendous amount from others in the online community. Check these classes out and get all your questions answered.

-        Virtual Family Reunions:  Using Online Tools to Find More Cousins Than You Know What To Do With
-       Interactive Genealogists Parts 1 and 2
-       Tweet Your Ancestors: Social Media for Genealogists
-       Social Networking for Genealogists
-       Virtual Presentations: "Second Life"
-       Playground Rules for the Genealogy Internet Collaborative Space

The Techie Classes:
Yes, we could never accomplish what we do now in genealogy if we didn’t have the techies to help us along the way. Knowing how and why genealogists do what they do helps the techies do what they do! So if you are a techie or you want to be a techie, check out the vast array of classes and workshops meant just for you.
.
-       Using GPUs for Image Processing
-       On the Road to Mashups: Integrating Data from API Providers
-       Family Social Graph (FSG) Mashups – A Family Gathering
-       Scalability in the Cloud
-       "No SQL" - Exploring the Super Powers of Graph and Document DBs
-       Using Microsoft Pivot to Show Genealogical Content
-       Bringing Distributed Version Control to Arbitrary Object Graphs"
-       Spring 3.0 meets FamilySearch API
-       Collaboration API
-       Watch and Notify API
-       Web services API 101 – Acronym Soup: REST, SOAP & XML
-       Identity API
-       Beginner to intermediate: Getting Started with API Development
-       Toward a responsible mobile strategy
-       Semantic Web Meets the Family Social Graph (FSG)
-       A Zombie Social Graph with XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and FOAF (Friend of a Friend)
-       Introduction and Comparison of Languages on JWM
-       360 Degree Virtual Panorama Photos/Photo Imaging for Producing Authentic On-Site Family History Root Experiences with Multimedia
-       ObjC/Cocoa
-       Systems and methods for spatially centric cemetery transcription
-       Systems and methods for geo-spatial and temporal interpretation of genealogical data
-       Legado: An Open-Source Python for Family History Research
-       An Exploration of the Integration of Social Networking Technologies into the Core Activities of Genealogical Societies
-       Genealogical Record Linkage
-       Beginner to intermediate: Finding Strategy in Design
-       Implications of GenesisGraphs on Source-Centric Collaborative Genealogy
-       Python Library and Gramps
-       Ruby Library
-       Scala: one language to rule them all!
-       Digital Preservation Tips for Programmers
-       Mobile Applications
-       Lessons from building Browser Plug-Ins

As you can see there is a myriad of topics, skill levels, and tools to help each and every one of us get a kick-start for the new year. So hurry and register right away before the early-bird registration is over on January 7th!  RootsTech Registration

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