A few final notes about the TIES conference...
- The highlight of the conference for me was the hour I got to spend hanging out with Dr. Jim Hirsch, Assistant Superintenent for Technology and Academic Services, Plano (TX) Independent School District. Jim and I talked about a variety of topics, including the need for better technology leadership training for K-12 administrators (surprise!), the difficulty of influencing policymakers, and the potential power of federal (or foundation) investment in free, high-quality, wiki-based, multimedia textbooks. I’ll blog on this latter issue sometime soon.
- As you know, I like to brag about the people and organizations that intersect with CASTLE. Two of our alumni were honored at the TIES conference. Matt Oswald, a math teacher at Stillwater (MN) Area High School and a member of our third School Technology Leadership cohort, was recognized as a TIES Exceptional Teacher this year. Lisa Finsness, Director of Instructional Media and Technology for the Osseo (MN) Area Schools and a member of our first cohort, was selected as the TIES / Palm, Inc. District Technology Leader of the year. Kudos to both Lisa and Matt!
- Tim Wilson noted that TIES was very Web 1.0: very few folks tagging or blogging along with the conference. I agree with him that this was disheartening. As Amy Hendrickson noted in her comment to Tim’s post (about my administrative blogging session), many attendees are just now learning what blogs are, how they work, etc. These folks are the ones that actually attended our state ed tech conference; I shudder to think about the folks that didn’t even come.
- Finally, several people, including Doug Johnson and Miguel Guhlin, said really nice things about my TIES presentations. Thanks.
That’s it from me for this year’s conference. We’ll see where we are next year at this time!
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