Conference Follow-Up

It's seems I've been so busy since we taught a session at the conference on 3/14. We had a great group of 49 participants. Since then we've been busy back to ASU Graduate School classes, getting grades into the computer, lesson planning, teaching, etc...

Unfortunately due to our county's student conference day we missed over half of Thursday's sessions. I greatly missed SMART Board sessions done by middle school teachers on Thursday afternoon.

Most of the sessions I attended were great.

Thursday after the opening session I learned about making my own Wiki. Kimberly Harris taught participants how to create their own wikis. She has been in touch with participants after the conference with more information.

The only other session I was able to attend on Thursday was Get your SMART Board up to Speed. I learned more tools that I didn't even know were available on my new SMART Board. I've already had fun using the timer and spinner with students.

On Friday morning Vicki and I spent the first session time visiting vendors and psyching ourselves up for presenting. It went well!

After presenting on Friday I went to a non-fiction session led by a well known company. Since I don't have the option of spending money on a big program this wasn't very interesting to me.

The last concurrent session I attended was Start SMART: Winning SMART Board Lessons. These two gentlemen were not only entertaining, but also informative. I learned even more about the options of using the SMART Board in my classroom.

The Closing Session and Luncheon were great. Our table was the Goody's 500 so many samples of Goody's on the table. Lunch was great, I even got Vicki to switch desserts and I got the chocolate!

I greatly enjoyed closing speaker Deneen Frazier-Bowen. What an actress! We found that she had been all of the interesting "students" that had visited pre-conference and concurrent sessions and the opening session as well.

A great close to the conference was the it was moving to Raleigh in 2009. The NCaect also moved the bus to a new name-- TIES. Looking forward to an opportunity to attend the conference in '09.