TCEA 2010 Final Notes
TCEA 2010 is over and I've had a chance to reflect on my experience there. I will say from the outset that this year, in my humble opinion, was the best of the five TCEA conferences I've attended. There are a couple reasons that stick out:
- THE App: What a great little iPhone app to help organize the week. Not once did I even look at the paper conference program while I was walking the convention center. Everything (well almost everything) in the app was current and extremely helpful. First, I was able to look at all the sessions and their descriptions and then "star" the sessions if I was interested. By "starring" the session, it was automatically imported into the app calendar. Then, immediately after the session, you could rate that session on a scale of one to five right on the iPhone app. This was huge for me as I was able to quickly look at the sessions I was interested in and then dump them all into the calendar. The other part of the app I really like was being able to peruse the list of vendors in the exhibit hall, "star" the vendor, and then look at a map of the hall with all my "starred" vendors placemarked on the map. If you've ever been to TCEA and the exhibit hall, you know this is a good thing given that the size of the exhibit hall was the size of five football fields. I generally have a lot of disdain for trolling the vendor area (except when trying to snag schwag for my kids back home). But there were a few I wanted to touch base with. Being able to pinpoint on the map the vendors I wanted to see really helped me stay away from aimlessly walking around the hall. Two suggestions for next year's app: 1. Incorporate the program addendum into the app. I had a rude awakening one morning because the session was moved to another day. Yes, I should have referred to the addendum but I was using my iPhone. 2. Mark on the session descriptions if it is a paid workshop. One of my coworkers showed up to a session only to be turned away because he wasn't aware from the iPhone app that it was a paid workshop. In the end however, this little app saved more time for me so I could catch more sessions and of course...
- Hang out in the Blogger's Cave - This year was so much better than last year. While last year, the Blogger's Garage seemed like an afterthought, this year's "cave" was a great environment to relax, converse, and yes, learn! It was tucked out of the way away from conference noise and you could even look through a window down on the exhibit hall floor. Several times during the conference, I found myself either teaching someone something or learning something from someone in an ad-hoc manner that, in my opinion, was a much better way to learn/teach than with a 45 minute sit-n-git session.
- Our school staff group blogging effort: It's interesting to see that in many schools, conference attendees are expected to come home and share what they learned. While this is a noble way to follow up and share information, I've rarely seen a successful live presentation of a conference reflection stuck at the end of an after school staff meeting. By the time the meeting rolls around, it's several weeks later, the energy has dwindled, and the audience really isn't interested in staying in the meeting longer than necessary. So, this year, we tried something a little different. We have a technology support blog (which this is posting to along with my own professional blog). I gave access to each of the blogs to the staff attending TCEA. Their mission was to create a reflective post each day while all that information is still swimming in their heads. Ultimately, our crew did an amazing job of reflecting and sharing and I hope to use this model to promote other conferences that our school regularly attends. BTW, I use Posterous as the platform for blogging..... simple as email.
