This week, the Georgia Educational Technology Conference wrapped up. I was able to attend for the first time in several years, and learned a few things:
- I really enjoy conferences. It's a chance to meet a variety of people, and learn from them, whether it's listening to them present, participating in discussions during sessions and workshops, or even "coffee pot" conversations. If you have the opportunity, I recommend you attend - whether it's a more general conference like GaETC or a more discipline-specific one, it's an opportunity to learn a lot.
- I really enjoy presenting at conferences. I gave two sessions this year: one on Bring Your Own Technology (which I've written about before), and issues with students and teachers interacting on Facebook. Both were fairly well-attended and, I think, successful. The conference provided session-specific feedback websites, but I have not yet received information about what people submitted for mine.
- I'm a big fan of Patrick Crispen - as is everybody else. If you've never heard Patrick speak, you should. He's a professor of education at the University of Southern California, and has been a regular GaETC guest for the past several years. He's engaging and knowledgeable, and popular, as judging by the number of his concurrent sessions that were at capacity.
Check out his website, NetSquirrel. - Conference locations need to accommodate their clientele. Ironically, the biggest problem that many thought was that the wireless connectivity was somewhat unreliable. This is one conference which it could be assumed that every attendee would have some internet-capable device, and would be expecting to use it. The wireless connection also affected several presentations, and some presenters had exclusively online content which, needless to say, made their presentations difficult.
There were some specific technology ideas that I also learned, but I thought I'd save those for another post (or several).
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