Saturday, June 28, 2014

#CoEdNet Goes to #ISTE2014 - The Frame

Yesterday I arrived in Atlanta with my rockstar teammates +Kevin Croghan and +Laura Mitchell to attend the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference. We have been looking forward to this one for a few months now, and I am excited to see what all the buzz is about since this is my first ISTE experience.

Last week we had the great pleasure of being at Copper Mountain Resort for the similar but smaller and more local Innovation Education Colorado (InnEdCo, formerly TIE) conference. I still haven't digested all of the fantastic things I learned and started to think about throughout that week, and many of my intended posts on the experience have yet to make their way out of my journal and into the blogosphere. What I can say is that being able to attend InnEdCo truly feeling like a Colorado Connected Educator this year made all the difference in how valuable the experience was for me. I had the great pleasure of presenting and being positioned to help other attendees (some from our district, others from around the state), which was a dream come true. I am still processing all the ways this year was so different for me and hope to share some of those takeaways soon because I really want to help others have the same transformative experience when they attend InnEdCo and other learning "events" in the future.

In the meantime I've shifted gears to ISTE for the next few days and want to share some of my thinking as it pertains to the conference experience itself. I anticipate this is going to look like a comparison of sorts, but we shall see how it evolves. This is by no means meant to be taken as criticism for either conference, but instead to be viewed as things I notice and wonder in an attempt to further process my experience and grow as a learner, attendee, facilitator, and organizer of adult learning.

I am also setting a goal for myself of lowering, as in way, WAY lowering, the expectations I have for sharing my thinking in this space. I am a forever perfectionist and writing purest of sorts, which means blog posts usually take me quite a little bit of time to create and actually share. (Ex: I have only recently taken to not proofreading & editing every email I send, though I still do so for quite a few depending on the audience.) That being said, I want to experiment a little with how I choose to use this space to capture my thinking, process ideas, and track my own growth over time. So over the next few days you may see some typos (just the thought makes me cringe!), and some of the thoughts shared might range from slightly rambling to incomprehensibly long-winded and fairly off-topic. My love for the Oxford comma and temptation to use it at every.single.turn will absolutely make an appearance at times. All of this is ok. I am not writing a book to be published, nor do I want myself or others to feel as though blogging has to be the kind of activity that has to take hours on end and be your absolute best work each time. My purpose in blogging is to process my learning and share it with others so they can learn with me and push my thinking even farther.

And with that, we're off!...

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