Training from Orlando you can take home

More than 850 journalists, educators and other professionals learned new skills, shared ideas and discussed best practices for journalism at the 2011 IRE Conference. Whether you made it to the conference or not, there are tips and tools that can be used in daily reporting and long-term projects.Now that the conference is in the past, it's time to dig in and get to work. Here are some resources that can help:

Tipsheets from the conference, which are still being organized by IRE's staff, can be found in the Resource Center by searching for 2011 IRE Conference (Orlando, Fla.). Nearly every panel was recorded and the audio files will be available to conference attendees or for sale to IRE members later this summer. We'll be collecting resources and story ideas throughout the year and sharing them online. Here is a list of just some of the some of the many other resources from the conference:

• Year in Review — Doug Haddix and Mark Horvit, of IRE, presented a rundown of the Year in Investigative Reporting (PDF). See what your colleagues have been up to and pick up story ideas and inspiration at the same time.
• Hands-On training at home — Didn't make it to one of the hands-on training sessions? No problem. Tableau Public posted all of its training materials online, including the data and step-by-step instructions.  The tutorial from the Google Fusion training is also available online.
• Business stories to cover — Linda Austin, executive director of Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, wrote several blog posts from the conference that are helpful for any journalist, but particularly cater to business coverage.  Her posts include story ideas to tackle from athletics to art and tips from top reporters on how to get people to talk to you.
• #IRE11 in context — Nick Diakopoulos used Vox Event Analytics to visualize all public tweets using the hashtag #IRE on Twitter. The tweets can be searched and are given semantic context. It's a great way to find ideas you might have missed from the conference.