Over the Presidents Day weekend I had the opportunity to attend IntegrateED-PDX. This is the conference formerly known as ITSC (Instructional Technology Strategies Conference), which is put on by OETC. Again this year the organizers brought together a great group of facilitators and participants and it was a busy 3 days of learning and sharing.
This year I was happy to see what seemed to be an uptick in participation by school administrators. Bill Carozza, Principal of Harold Martin Elementary School in Hopkinton, NH, lead a workshop on Social Media for School Leaders. His was a great session and provided an opportunity for me to met and work with several principals that I have come to know through social media, but had not met face to face before the conference. This seems to be the case each year with this conference. Kind of like my Twitter stream come to life.
I also had the opportunity to co-focilitate a session with Tricia George, the topic being Supporting Technology Leadership in Schools. This was a follow up to some work we did last summer with administrators through the Oregon Virtual School District. This initiative provides an opportunity for a cadre of school leaders to come together to learn about using technology to help support teaching and learning in their schools.
Finally, at the closing session I had the opportunity to take part in what they call the Soirée of Slides, which is basically an Ignite session. I got to get up for 5 minutes and tell a story illustrated with some images. It was a lot of fun. I took this opportunity to create my slide deck using HaikuDeck, a free iPad app that allows you to create slide presentations, but without all the bells and whistles of traditional presentation software. It is based on design principles that suggest that less is more. It is great for creating little adhoc presentations on the fly and I enjoyed learning to use it for my little talk. Below, you can take a look.
Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad
I am looking forward to next year's event and the opportunity to continue to work and learn with folks I met this year.