A Year of ISTE

Last month I was lucky to be sent to the ISTE 2013 conference in San Antonio, Texas. This year I have been the iPad coordinator at my school and since I'm still kind of a newbie to all of this tech stuff I decided to head south to Texas and check out what all the buzz about ISTE was. For those of you that don't know, ISTE stands for International Society for Technology in Education. If you want to know more, check out the site, https://www.iste.org/.

I've been to several teaching conferences before, probably about one major conference a year since I started teaching seven years ago. ISTE was probably the largest conference that I've been to and I was COMPLETELY overwhelmed. But I LOVED IT! I think I read somewhere that there were about 13,000 people there. It was chaos, it was information overload, but it was AMAZING.

I arrived on Sunday and went to my first session Monday morning at 8am. I went from session to session without time to catch my breath in between. I think I stayed till 6 that night. I repeated these steps for the following two days. I think I attended at least 8 sessions a day, maybe more. I could not get enough.

So, I have a goal for this coming school year. I want to attempt to try every single thing that I learned at ISTE at least once. From QR Codes (which I've actually done a ton with but learned even more) to this new Augmented Reality that I had never seen before.

I was amazed at all that technology has to offer us as educators and I left San Antonio with an excitement for what I would be able to do. The only downside was that the conference was in June and I have to wait till the end of August to try this all with my students. I mean...I guess I'll take my summer break...but I secretly wish this conference was later in the summer so that I could take that passion that I left with and use it all immediately!