This June, I had the chance to travel to Philadelphia with 4 other FDR educators to experience the biggest event on the edtech calendar; #ISTE9. And although this post is sadly about a month late (summer vacation ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) I wanted to debrief and share my experience with you.
I had only ever heard about ISTE from others who had gone. And to be honest, it sounded pretty intimidating. I had heard stories of whole teams of teachers being formed to try and cover the event in its entirety. I heard stories of people getting locked out of all of their events because they bungled the registration process. I heard stories about how it is more of a marathon than a convention, and how your feet ache after the day of running around the Philly convention centre. So I prepped myself as best I could; I figured out what topics I wanted to focus on (Computational Thinking, AR/VR, Data Visualization and EdTech Democracy) pinned my Google Keep notes and laced up my most comfy shoes and got ready to take on this huge event.
It definitely takes some time to get oriented to the huge space and to figure out where you need to be. You also need to feel comfortable with getting up and leaving to go to your Plan B if the workshop you chose doesn't work out. I had already been to another large education conference called SXSW, and found the two to be fairly similar in terms of structure and layout.
There is so much to talk about with this event, that it's hard to know where to even begin debriefing it. If you're looking for tips and tools, I would suggest scrolling through the #ISTE19 hashtag on twitter or checking out these crowd-sourced notes that were being passed around. They are both huge gold-mines. But for me, the most powerful takeaway is that this event is exactly what you make of it. It's like that corny old Oprah' book club book 'The Secret'. Whatever you are looking is what you will find there!
If you want to learn, there are about 2000 workshops put on by the best in education. I got Wanda Terall to teach me how to make a Chrome extension. I had Dr. Scott Garigan show me how to incorporate machine learning into my teaching. I had Nicole Stulak and Jennifer Hervada share me with some incredible strategies and resources in coaching. I had Nicolas Provenzano show me how to bring coding and CT into an English lesson. The best of the best happily opening their toolkits with me! Teacher nirvana!
If you want to network, there is no. better. place. You can meet your edtech superheroes walking down the hall and they are all happy to chat! I FINALLY got to meet some of my favourite PLN people like Jen Giffen and Andrew Stillman. I had Wesley Chun, a Google Developer I have followed on YouTube for years walk right by and he was glad to stop and chat! I got to reconnect with my #SWE17 gang and see all of the wonderful work they are doing with their projects. And I got to meet many new people as well who were incredibly inspiring like Clay Smith, John Zingale and Alicia Duell
And speaking of inspiration, it comes in spades at ISTE. It is pretty much the most stoked group of educators you will ever find under one roof, so it is hard not to feel like you are in the best profession on earth. All I will say is that you should check out the ISTE Channel on YouTube. Any breakdown I do here will not do justice to the amazing keynote speakers who rock it on the main stage.
In the coming weeks, months and semesters I will be leaning hard on my ISTE experience as I try and bring what I have learned to my community of teachers and students at FDR. Going to a conference like this lights the fuse on your teaching once again and reaffirms that education is the most engaging and exciting career on the planet.
Hopefully I will see you at #ISTE20!
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