Accelerate & IntegratedPDX14

Photo Credit: rwentechaney via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: rwentechaney via Compfight cc

I am looking forward to a couple of events this week.

IntegratedPDX is a education conference put on by the folks at OETC that attempts to connect people in the educational technology world with one another and provide a venue for the sharing of ideas and strategies that focuses on learning and how technology can be used to support this.

Photo Credit: rwentechaney via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: rwentechaney via Compfight cc

The conference starts Wednesday night with a keynote by Mark Frauenfelder, founder of BoingBoing and co-editor and founder of Make magazine. The organizers of this conference do an excellent job bringing in speakers, who are at first glance, are not connected to traditional education, but are always connected to learning and how people learn. 

The traditional keynote is where this conference stops being like most education conferences. It doesn't have speakers, but rather facilitators/presenters. The goal of each session is not to have participants sit and listen to someone up in front of the room, but rather get people in the room talking and sharing and learning from one another. I'm looking forward to facilitating a session, Making Connections - Supporting Educational Technology as a Building Leader, on Thursday with Tricia George.

Another event that is connected to IntegratedPDX, is Accelerate. Accelerate, also sponsored by OETC, has a similar format to IntegratedPDX, but is only one day and the focus is on school leaders. This takes place on Wednesday. Tricia and I are also doing a session at Accelerate, Juggling the Possibilities: Promoting personal growth and teacher innovation through technology in K-12 schools

The hashtag for both events is #ipdx14