If you’ve been following along with our many updates during the month of October (and if you haven’t, you should really sign up for our newsletter), you know that we’ve all been pretty busy. Every week of this past month, we’ve been appearing at events, presenting at others, and I think we'd also attended one or two as guests. Now that the craziness of October is over, we can relax a bit in November. No, wait. That’s not true. November is going to be just as busy. Oh well, here’s the STEM events where you can find us!
Putting Your Tech Foot Forward
As much as we’d like to, we can’t claim responsibility for the clever title of this first event. That’s because it was probably conceived by someone much smarter than any of us. Why do we say that? Well, because, on Nov. 6, we'll be teaming up with the Museum of Science to host ‘Putting Your Tech Foot Forward!’ The interactive event is featuring a bunch of all-new technologies and tables hosted by your favorite Eduporium personalities, also known as people you have never met before! The event is taking place in the Museum of Science’s new wing and they are even supplying some amazing speakers who will discuss how technology is impacting education and how it will continue to advance a number of STEM innovations in learning!
Aside from the presentations, the event will include dinner, drinks, and the opportunity to try some of these cutting-edge technologies. As we said, the date is Nov. 6 (save it) from 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm at the Museum of Science. The staff at the Museum of Science will fill guests in on their plans for constructing a new Tech Studio as well as their Tech and You exhibit. We will help fill in gaps with hands-on EdTech demonstrations and helpful EdTech experts to answer questions about classroom technologies. This experience can show how technology can advance STEM learning and how various tools in our store make this possible. It’s an honor to partner with the Museum of Science, so we hope all educators in the area make it!
Speakers at this cool event include David Dockerman from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and John Richards from Consulting Services for Education and the HGSE. They will be discussing technology’s role in our evolving world among other topics. The guests will also have an opportunity to try various virtual and augmented reality systems, learn about our robotics progression, and explore both 3D printing and the Internet of Things. This is a super unique opportunity to learn about some of the up-and-coming tools from the STEM world and to do so in a prestigious and private space. We hope to see everybody there!
Merging Minds and Technology
The title for this next event sounds a little interesting, right? It could very well become entirely possible that this is a reality in just a few years with the advances of artificial intelligence and all the other fun stuff taking over. For now, though, it’s just the name of one of our other marquee November events, which is being put on by Learning & the Brain in the Back Bay of Boston on Nov. 10. We were invited to exhibit by Learning & the Brain and we’re real excited to attend! At this event, we're going to be hosting a demo of virtual reality equipment—namely the Oculus Rift—and some other innovative EdTech, including robot kits and maybe even some drones. We’ll be there this coming Friday with our booth open from 12:30-1:30 pm, and again from 2:30-3:30 pm for visitors.
This is our very first time exhibiting at the event and it will have no shortage of prestigious presenters. The headliners include Eric Sheninger, Mark Barnes, Caitlin Krause, Starr Sackstein, Monica Burns, and Shelly Terrell among many other distinguished educators and professors from both faraway and local colleges. If you’re not all that familiar with the EdTech landscape, these names are very well-known among innovative educators and we’re humbled to receive an invite to the same event. Plus, there are going to be some big name sponsors there as well including the National Association of Elementary School Principals, National Association of Secondary School Principals, MIT's Integrated Learning Initiatives, the Yale Comer School Development Program, and Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. We’re grateful for this opportunity.
At the conference, which spans the entirety of Veteran’s Day weekend, attendees will have the chance to learn how they can use robotics to teach coding and 21st century skills, create engaging school spaces, leverage virtual reality to reach all children, engaging students with maker activities, and a whole lot more. This sounded perfect for us to set up shop and show some cool tools for everybody to learn about. While we do focus almost exclusively on using tech and STEM education, a lot of our tools will weave their way into the mainstream world as well. So, we will be ready to demonstrate how you might use them. Merging Minds & Technology is taking place from Nov. 10-12 and we’ll be there with some awesome EdTech tools on Friday, Nov. 10 from 12:30-1:30 pm and again from 2:30-3:30 pm. We hope to see you there!
NYSCATE Conference
Once we make it through these first two events, we’re heading back into one of our most frequently visited areas. This annual NYSCATE Conference takes place every year just before Thanksgiving in Rochester, NY. It’s one of those places that’s really far to drive, but not far enough away to fly. So, we’re loading up the car and making the 6-hour voyage, arriving a couple of days before the conference begins. That is because, in addition to exhibiting, we’re also hosting a pre-conference workshop! The conference is held from Nov. 18-21 and our presentation on virtual reality as well as our pre-conference tech petting zoo workshop will be on Nov. 19! If anyone’s going to be at the conference, we hope you’ll attend!
NYSCATE is the New York State Association for Computers and Technology in Education. The organization features over 25,000 members who strive to use technology for enhancing teaching and learning. They are also affiliates of ISTE, SETDA, and COSN and work with many educational organizations across New York. They do this to help get the best technologies in the hands of their teachers and students. Also, they work with Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in New York, organizations that we have plenty of experience partnering with. They’re people we want to work with and provide new technology solutions in robotics, 3D printing, and even virtual reality. Crowds at the conference should be pretty large and we’re looking forward to furthering this partnership and creating new ones!
Besides our presentation, we’ll also have a booth, so all educators in attendance can ask questions and try new technologies. Even if you don’t see anything you think you have interest in, we'd encourage everybody to try something new! The theme of the conference is ‘shifting gears’ and that’s exactly what we’re going to try to do during our five or so days in upstate New York. It’s going to be a very long conference, but it's one that we certainly know is definitely attending. The atmosphere at these NYSCATE events is fantastic and all the crowds they draw are unbeatable. We’d be lying, however, if we said that we were not going to take our subsequent Thanksgiving break very seriously!
Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference
In October, we exhibited at Massachusetts’ greatest STEM conference (MassCUE) and, toward the end of November, we’ll be at what’s arguably the top one that New Hampshire has to offer. That Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference takes place from Nov. 27-30 in Manchester, NH and attracts hundreds of teachers from the Granite state. So, while our Thanksgiving breaks might be short, we’re excited to travel north and show how we help educators innovate. We arrive in Manchester on Monday, Nov. 27 and get right into the action with a 6-hour pre-conference workshop that Monday. It’s called The Student-centered Makerspace as a 21st Century Playground. We’ll be showing educators how the technology we offer can help enhance meaningful MakerEd experiences with opportunities for hands-on play!
Right now, registration for our workshop looks good and we cannot wait for it to arrive. That’s also because we’re hosting two different presentations at this event! That’s right—we have a second presentation with an encore about the possibilities of virtual reality for education on Tuesday. We believe that this technology will strongly impact STEM instruction as we move forward and we’ll show you why. We’ll display an Oculus Rift system for participants' sampling before remaining inside our booth for the rest of the conference. If you've never tried a VR system like this, believe us when we tell you it’s an entirely different animal. It’s not like the cardboard viewers—instead it easily transports students to exciting worlds they would otherwise never be able to experience.
This conference will highlight the sharing of successful technologies for teaching among educators. We are going to embrace this theme by allowing teachers to try out innovative tools, and offer additional advice for how they could use these tools to their fullest in the classroom. We'll also be there to recommend products for all areas of STEM education, advice for integration tips, and customized solutions that can work in their particular classroom. We hope everybody will come by our booth on Tuesday and Wednesday and that our presentations will be packed! This is one of our final big events of the year (thankfully) and we can’t wait to begin! For more information on the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference, visit their website.
NAMTC Leadership Summit and AESA Annual Conference
In June, we traveled to San Antonio for ISTE 2017, and very much enjoyed the city as a whole. So, we are going back at the end of the month! This time, however, it’s for the NAMTC Leadership Summit on Nov. 28-29 and the AESA Annual Conference from Nov. 29-Dec. 2. We have gone to these two back-to-back STEM events each of the last two years in New Orleans and Savannah, and we’re ready to take them on again for the third time. At each event, we’ll have our booth set up with the best innovative tech options for teachers. We will also be discussing how we work with educational service agencies to better serve all the educators who fall under each of them, and how we can recommend technology to help library and media specialists deliver a relevant education to every student they teach.
NAMTC stands for the National Association of Media and Technology Centers. Their team helps educators leverage technology in libraries and media centers to create a more engaging STEM experience for kids. In recent years, this may have been confined to computing technology and laptops or tablets that simply give students access to everything they needed to find on the Internet. Now, however, libraries are evolving and many even completely transforming into makerspaces. So, we now get to offer the audience more of those relevant tools they are looking for, like 3D printers, virtual reality sets, robotics, and other STEM solutions. It is always exciting to exhibit there and we’re looking forward to arriving back in Texas real soon.
After two days for NAMTC, we’ll then be staying in San Antonio to exhibit at this AESA Annual Conference. Educational Service Agencies (ESA) are groups that serve as a buffer between school teams and EdTech companies like us. We work with them to recommend EdTech products for the schools that they serve and they come back to us with what the teachers in those schools want to purchase. We’ll be exhibiting at this event from Nov. 30-Dec. 2 and our booth will be featuring all the usual suspects—the top technologies for advancing 21st century education. So, whether it’s in a classroom, library, or makerspace and at any level of education, we have the right technology solutions you love. We very much look forward to wrapping up our busiest time of the year and we’re excited to get started at the Museum of Science on Monday night!
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