I haven’t been to a conference in a while. I haven’t entirely isolated as I have able to attend trainings outside my school with the North Cascades and Olympic Science Partnership (NCOSP) and the Olympic Math and Science Partnership (OMSP) and West Sound GreenSTEMs and Washington STEM as well as working with my Science PLC, but I haven’t been to a conference with people from all over the world, or at least US, in 12 years. The last time I attended a conference like that was the 2002 NCCE conference. I’ve been on Twitter for almost five years now and have “met” and interacted with hundreds of great educators of all types from superintendents to teachers and librarians and yet in all that time I’ve only met one of my PLN tweeps face to face, Tyler Rice – @MrTRice_Science, at a Washington STEM event! (Which was cool btw.) I read tweets of people meeting face to face at events and I’ve been hoping to meet more some day and this week I got my chance to meet a few more tweeps!
Our superintendent, @Rich_Stewart1, sent our district tech committee to this years NCCE Conference in Seattle! My second one! We used a hashtag to keep our thoughts altogether, #csd49, because that’s our school district, Chimacum School District #49.
At the conference I had the pleasure of finally meeting Eric Sheninger, @NMHS_Principal, face to face after his keynote and we even got to sit together at a Minecraft session, and I got to see Gary Stager’s keynote, @garystager, but I didn’t get to meet him. I did meet or attend workshops and sessions with some incredible people and have added them to my PLN but I never got to meet or attend sessions of a few people I wanted to meet from that I’ve followed for sometimes years, I saw Janet Avery, @averyteach, tweeting but I never ran into her, and I missed all the sessions by Jeff Utecht, @jutecht, Jeremy Macdonald, @MrMacnology, and Sylvia LibowMartinez @smartinez! I never even saw them! Maybe someday I’ll run into them and get to say hi and shake hands. I am excited with all the people I met and all the people who led the sessions and workshops I attended! They made this conference absolutely a great experience for me. 🙂 Here are some that I tweeted with, learned from (either directly or indirectly): @brownron, @agcsschool, @crewsertech, @mikegusto, @HollyClarkEdu, @EHS_Cochran, @brookster29, @mrdeniston, @mrsnyderman73, @techsavvyteach, @kentbrooks, @caddiscaster, @TEACHheartSOUL, @DaveGuymon. Yeah, I got their Twitter handles easily because they were all over the #NCCE2014 hashtag! There were more so who did I forget?
As I process through all the stuff I learned I hope to write more but in the meantime I’m going to share our tech team’s tweets and retweets with this Storify. So much to learn, so little time.
