I hosted my own conference this week and approximately 18,000 people attended #edchat #iste11

Last summer I wrote a post about the emergence of new and emerging types of conferences for teacher professional development. In that post I mentioned the unconference, the online conference, and the edubloggercon but I also proposed the idea that with the plethora of great presentations and keynotes available online that people could curate their own conferences online by collecting links to and embeds of these resources on their own wiki or blog. In fact, many people have done this time and again but usually we don't think of these collections as conferences. Today I would like to propose another approach.

This week, at the ISTE Conference in Philadelphia, we had the formal conference, the ISTE Unplugged sessions, and Edubloggercon but there was also another conference going on there, one few people knew about, one I silently hosted. On yellow post-it notes I printed QR codes that linked to great talks, presentations, and keynotes addressing a wide range of education and technology issues that I would liked to have seen at the ISTE conference. Drawing inspiration from street artists like Banksy and Space Invader I posted these post-it notes all over the convention center on conference signage, pillars, walls, doors, tables, etc. One could get an entirely different conference by walking around the convention center and scanning these QR codes.


I have no way of knowing exactly how many people scanned these QR codes, the technology seemed to saturate the conference and I really didn't see many people scan any of these things. I also admit that I find the whole QR thing somewhat annoying but I couldn't think of a better way to subversively host my own conference at ISTE. So, in a way, I can now say that I hosted my own conference of which approximately 18,000 educators were in attendance.

So, here are a few examples of some of the presentations from my underground ISTE conference:

How the ISTE NETS are an equity issue.

The past three weeks I have been working with teachers in my district on exploring the ISTE NETS. My purpose with these sessions (so far we have had two 1 hour sessions in each building) has been three-fold:

• Engage teachers in targeted dialogue about the ISTE NETS by having them deconstruct them and focus their meaning.
• Engage teachers in the use of some tools that they could use with students that address what these standards ask them to do.
• Through the process of writing our own versions of the standards, have teachers internalize as a goal that which the ISTE NETS asks teachers and students to do.

Up until this point I have been intentionally vague about my purpose in having teachers do this, calculating that the purpose would be revealed through dialogue with each other. While this has, for the most part, happened with most groups I feel the need to start our last sessions this week a more direct and explicit statement of why we are exploring the NETS (and it really doesn't have much to do with technology at all). To do this I will be using the following presentation:



(to view all parts you may need to expand to full-screen.)

Also, this presentation attempts to answer some questions that have arisen as a result of these discussion sessions:

1. Why do we need to spend all this time talking about technology?
2. How are we going to be assessed?
   

ISTE 2010 & SEMTEC Techspo 2010

I have been feverishly getting ready for ISTE in Denver later this month. I will be presenting a poster session there on iTeach Mobile and co-presenting a BYOL session with Vivian Johnson, Cara Hagen, and Scott Schwister on Technology Enhanced Active Learning Strategies. We are also lucky enough to get a chance to do a trial run of both these sessions next week at the regional SEMTEC Techspo in Stewartville, MN. This is the third year SEMTEC has held this Techspo and it has quickly turned into a very nice little conference.

Of course there will be some format differences between my iTeach Mobile poster session and a iTeach Mobile discussion session. For example, the discussion session at Techspo will focus more on issues related to using mobile devices in schools while my ISTE poster session will focus more on the model of blended PLC and social networking for professional development we used in Goodhue to explore the use of mobile devices in education. But, these two sessions are largely the same.

If you are going to ISTE I invite you to my iTeach Mobile poster session (our BYOL session is full). If you are going to either of these events, below is a preview of my iTeach Mobile session. Presented for your review and critique:

click here to view this in a new window

Also, for those attending our BYOL session on Technology Enhanced Active Learning Strategies, here is a link to our session wiki (now only partially under construction):

ehanceactivelearntechnology - home via kwout