How to Get Ready for an ISTE Conference!

As part of my first assignment for my Connected Learning experience in the #CLMOOC sponsored by the Educator Innovator and the National Writing Project, we were asked to make a "How To" manual as a way to explain a little about ourselves as well as dive into the creative making atmosphere.

I would like to pause here for a moment and reflect on my learning over the past week. First of all, this took me WAY WAY WAY longer than I thought it would. WikiHow was not an easy beast to tame and I'm stupified by it as I find myself to be quite techie. Between converting photos, uploading or searching for videos, and being re-edited as I created it, I was constantly fighting against the platform! I did much better with the HackPad site as it was much more simplified and straightforward. What I took away from the whole experience was that I am lucky that I have built up so much resilience (I blogged about this last week in my post here) because I really needed to keep pushing forward while I encountered frustration after frustration. It made me ponder, if I had that much trouble as a "techie" teacher, what would other teachers feel and experience? (Future blog post on this topic pending as I am now digressing!)

Anyway, here is my first silly attempt with a real intent behind it. (I'm desperate for some Google Glass so I want my husband to see how cool I am wearing a pair. This will magically inspire him to let me buy some, right?! RIGHT?!!) I want to give a shout out to my friend Chris Craft for letting me and my teaching team experience his Google Glass while he was here for our recent #gafesummit in Chile!

=> How to Look Cool Wearing Google Glass

Okay. Now on to something more serious... For my real "How To" I decided to tackle a recurring theme in my work so that I can share it with others right away. Every year, I take one or two teachers from my school to the ISTE conference as a way to generate teacher level, grass-roots interest in embedding more technology into the various subject areas of the school. Each year I have a meeting with teachers who went with me previously to help explain what ISTE is, how to plan your ISTE experience, etc. While I'm certainly not going to pass up the great discussion that happens at the face to face meetings, it is good when you can have a resource to back up what they learned from the meeting. Enter my "How to Get Ready for an ISTE Conference" product! I hope you enjoy it and maybe, just maybe, someone might find it useful as well! Feel free to add to it and hopefully visit it next year when I update it!

=> How to Get Ready for an ISTE Conference

Are you planning on going to ISTE this year? Will this "How To" help you? What could I add to make it more useful for my teachers that will accompany me next year?

Looking forward to your thoughts!
Jessica :)