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This year's TIES conference was exactly what I look forward to and expect. The environment at this conference is hard to explain. It's full of educators that are technology minded and pushing forward for their kids. There's a constant buzz of excitement and energy! I loved every single second! Mr. Reynolds tweeted that he "found his tribe" at this conference... my sentiments exactly!
When Mr. Vagle and I were told we were selected to present, we were thrilled! Being a presenter at this conference is one of the most rewarding things I have done in my entire life. I have trained teachers from schools in our region on a variety of technology subjects, and a school in North Dakota on teacher blogs. This was just the push forward and challenge I was looking for! I'm always looking for the next big step forward in my career, and this was exactly what I needed.
Before our session started, there were 101 people signed up to listen to us speak! How cool is that? It was so humbling to know so many forward thinking educators were interested in what Mr. Vagle and I had to say! I will be presenting again next year, without a doubt! Maybe I'll even speak at 2 sessions!
This was the view before our presentation started. People were sitting on the floor on both sides and in the hallway in the back! There were even a couple of people sitting behind me! They couldn't see the screen but wanted to listen anyways! Literally, standing room only! This was very affirming for me! One of the most rewarding things was chatting with teachers afterwards that wanted to meet me and learn more about what I do! I felt like a rockstar teacher! A few people even came up to say this was the best session they attended all day long. That was just the icing on the cake! :)
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| It's so cool knowing that our class inspired other classes to start tweeting! A few different classes are now on Twitter thanks to the Tweeting Top Dogs! Whoot whoot! |
We received lots of positive feedback, but this one was my favorite!
I was able to listen to several incredible speakers from around the USA at this conference. Some of my favorites are Marc Prensky, Molly Schroeder, Mark Garrison, and Jim Sill. But, my all-time favorite has to be Mr. McDreamy aka George Couros from Canada. I could listen to him for hours. Here are a couple of pictures from his presentation on Tuesday. Yes, I got a picture with him. Yes, it was posted to Twitter! :) He was the highlight of the conference for me. I am also including some live tweets I posted during his session.
And of course a few pics with the beautiful Mrs. Johnson...
How many days until next year's conference? I can't wait!!!
Loved reading your post on the conference and congratulations on having a packed house!!! It is a great feeling to know that you are doing work that people look at and want to learn from. Congratulations :)
ReplyDeleteA couple of things....The first one is technical.
You should look at Storify for pulling your tweets together from the conference. It is a nice format and you can actually write your whole blog post in the format and then embed it. You should try it out; you might love it :) It is definitely my favourite "Twitter" app that I have used.
Secondly...I read the tweet from Mark Garrison's session and it struck me a bit. I totally get what Mark is saying and know he is brilliant, but sometimes we look at these conferences as giving us something to do in our class on "Monday", but one of my approaches is not necessarily to get you to do something different on Monday, but to think different for a long time. I think that we live in a time that I can find new stuff at any point by going on social media and taking stuff, but too many people wait for these conferences to give them permission to do something different. Why?
I hope that we can create some different mindsets at these conference that will enable teachers to go past the new thing for Monday, but coming out a changed educator. Does that make any sense?
It was great meeting you and I look forward to connecting again!!!
George
Thanks for your idea about Storify! It is easy to use and a lot easier to read then pasting together pieces of a Twitter feed! Very cool. I will be sharing it when I present in January on PLNs at our regional tech day.
DeleteI like that you commented on finding new stuff at any point and making your teaching better. I think an awesome conference like TIES is the jackpot for teachers. However, my PLN has changed my teaching this year more than ever. I am excited to get other teachers from regional schools connecting with other teachers around the world through IG, TPT, Twitter, Blogger, and Pinterest next month. Twitter and IG are my favorites. I can ask a question or look for a new idea and have immediate feedback and an answer. I saw a tweet at TIES that isolation is now a choice. Why choose to have no PLN? I don't get it. Professional development at any time!!! Hopefully the ideas teachers walk away with are long lasting, and not just for Monday.
Thanks for stopping by my blog and reading my post!! I appreciate it!
Kayla