Some of us have already landed in San Antonio and the rest of the Eduporium team is flying in at various times on Sunday! We’re spending most of the day tomorrow getting our brand new booth (No. 1763) ready to showcase and putting the finishing touches on our display. If you’re so inclined to come visit us during our three days at ISTE, we would certainly welcome everyone, especially teachers, librarians, administrators, and makerspace leaders! If you need some more convincing, here are some extra incentives for you to drop by our interactive booth!
Free Stuff
If you’ve never heard of Eduporium before, first of all, you’re totally missing out! Now that we’ve got those pleasantries out of the way, Eduporium is an EdTech haven and school partner with educational experts who specialize in locating the very best STEM tools and helping teachers learn how to use them effectively. We are a reseller, but making money isn’t our end goal. We strive every day to ensure that teachers and students are gaining the full benefits of educational technology by providing recommendations for only the best products and supplying starter activities and set-up instructions to guarantee the tools are being used properly. What does this have to do with free stuff? Well, our consultation and advice are both completely free (especially at ISTE), but, more importantly, we will be giving away some of these recommendations we speak of totally for FREE throughout the show!
Those attending this year’s conference and those who have been there before know that there is a lot of time to be spent at the exhibit hall. The official show is about eight hours long the first two days and six or seven (depending on outbound flights and levels of fatigue) on the third and final day. Plus, there are afterhours events and other sessions and parties that take place at the convention center in addition to each day’s festivities. So, what we’re getting at is that attendees will be spending quite a lot of time at the Henry B. Gonzalez Center. Since that’s the case, we want to help make it more rewarding. So, we are raffling off three of our signature EdTech bundles and we have just learned what the products inside will be. Since we’re sure everybody’s super interested in finding out, we’ll spill the beans. Each of the three bundles will include a an Ozobot Starter Pack, a Makey Makey kit, and a Puzzlets kit with other awesome tech tools sprinkled in to each of them! All tolled, that’s over $500 worth of innovative, inventive, and inspirational EdTech per bundle!
So, how would one enter these awesome raffles? Well, to put it simply, you must come to our booth before we draw the winner for each prize! We are holding three main raffles during the show (for three of these bundles). The first will take place on Monday afternoon, the second on Tuesday morning, and the third on Tuesday afternoon. To enter, simply stop by Booth 1763, chat us up for a bit, and fill out one of our raffle tickets (it will only take a second)! Then, come back in time for the drawing and see if you won! And, here’s another special piece of inside information just for you. These bundles...they will not be the only prizes we are giving away at ISTE. Nope, we have some more free stuff up our sleeves and we’ll pass on more information about our ISTE flash giveaways when they’re ready to launch. All we can tell you for now is to monitor the Eduporium Twitter account and our Instagram stories for clues, both of which can be found at @Eduporium. We wouldn’t mind the follows, either.
Interactive Play
We could stand at our booth, which is going to look spectacular by the way (so long as nothing gets lost in shipping), and tell you all about the benefits of educational technology until we’re blue in the face. Or, we could just show you. Like students, we’ve found that educators, too, tend to get more excited about learning and trust EdTech products more when they can experience them for themselves. So, that’s another thing we’re going to be offering at Booth 1763. If you’re a teacher who prefers active learning rather than wandering around and begrudgingly taking a bunch of handouts you’ll just throw away (sorry, we’ll have some, too), then our booth is where you need to be to experience hands-on play with STEM tools.
Whatever subjects and grade levels you teach, we’ll have something for you to come try. Our interactive tech playground is even big enough to accommodate large groups at the same time, so nobody should have to wait around to try our cool tools. Among our best products, which will be making the trip to Texas, are littleBits, SAM Labs, Ozobot, Makey Makey, and plenty more! So, for teachers interested in circuitry, robotics, coding, DIY, 3D printing, and even virtual reality (more on that later), we’re confident we can introduce you to something new and get you excited about it at the same time! Hopefully everyone who stops by can teach us something new about a product as well!
If you leave our booth having learned one thing, we want that one thing to be that there is no wrong way to harness creativity using STEM tools. All of the products you will see on display are designed to get students thinking with their brains as well as working with their hands. Through active learning, they will become more engaged and more likely to find innovative solutions to complex problems, which they will obviously need to do in the real world. For that reason, we knew we had to make our booth interactive so that teachers could experience our products and bundles in the same ways that students do, creating active learning in the process. We know a lot of teachers will have used some of these tools before, but I think it’s pretty safe to say we can find something new for you to try at Booth 1763!
Educational Expertise
A lot of the times when teachers decide they want to try a new EdTech product, it’s because they’ve heard friends or colleagues talk about this tool after having used it in their classroom. And, unfortunate as it may be, these experiments don’t always work out the ways educators would have liked. At Eduporium, we take the time to research, test, and determine which STEM tools among the thousands available are actually useful in modern education as well as whether or not they’re here to stay and whether they will even be relevant in a year or two. From coding to engineering and 3D printing to robotics, we know what works in K-12 classrooms, libraries, and makerspaces because, more likely than not, we’ve seen it in action in these kinds of settings.
Every technology product that we select to our store must have a relevant educational aspect to it. It’s not enough for students to know how to use a technology tool—as cool as it may be—if it is not helping them to learn some kind of pertinent skill for the real world. It takes a keen eye to know what kinds of tools enable educational innovation and, perhaps more importantly, which products are a waste of time. At Eduporium, we like to think of ourselves as a one-stop shop for teachers, principals, librarians, and district leaders to turn to if they’re not quite sure which direction they should go as well as an outlet for them to acquire compatible technologies with guidance from our EdTech experts.
With years of classroom experience, our team has combined an eye for innovation with an aptitude for technology. Together, we believe, this can help teachers transform their classrooms for the better and provide children with the education they need. So, whether you need a recommendation for a classroom-friendly 3D printer, a push in the right direction with unboxing instructions, a custom tech bundle, starter activities for the classroom, or anything else related to educational technology, we’ll be at ISTE to help you solve these problems. We know that leaping into a new way of teaching can be daunting for educators, especially as new technologies come at you faster than you can process. That’s why we’re here to make this transition as smooth and simple as possible.
Live VR Demo
For teachers who love technology, we’re not sure there’s going to be a more disruptive niche in education than virtual reality. And, after trying it ourselves, we’re pretty sure there’s no more complete VR headset on the market than the Oculus Rift. We want all teachers—regardless of the subjects they teach and their pre-existing knowledge of VR—to try this immersive technology and begin to understand its implications in education. So, we will be setting up the full Oculus experience at Booth 1763 complete with handheld controllers, a high-powered computer, and incredibly lifelike graphics on the monitor. You may even get to walk around since we should have a lot of room to work with at our 10x10 booth (no promises).
The Oculus system allows students to escape to environments they otherwise would never be able to see firsthand. Take a student who’s spent their entire life in the city. They’ve probably never been somewhere like the Grand Canyon, Mt. Rushmore, or even back in time to walk with the dinosaurs, and we’re fairly certain they’ve never been to space. With virtual reality, however, they can travel to any one of these destinations and it won’t even cost thousands of dollars. The advanced technology in the Oculus Rift convinces children that they are actually physically transplanted to these virtual environments as they enjoy a complete 360-degree view of their surroundings complete with sounds and other interactive content.
That’s what virtual reality provides for students—the chance to visualize history or modern science up close and personal. While VR is not exactly commonplace in education today, we think that if you give it even just five years, it will become a force in every STEM school. For that reason, we want educators at ISTE to become more confident in VR’s ability to enhance their teaching and hopefully learn that it’s not here to replace them. And, hey, the best way to get more comfortable with VR as a teaching tool is to strap on the headset and give it a whirl! We’ll send you straight down to the bottom of the ocean, a couple hundred feet below the surface and you’ll find yourself on a sunken ship. Look up and down and all around and hopefully you’ll leave Booth 1763 with a new appreciation for this incredible technology and ideas for using it in class.
You’ll Need a Break
There’s something like 1,400 sessions at ISTE this year and hundreds of different EdTech booths you’re probably going to want to explore. That will make for some tired feet by the second half of Day 1! Tip No. 1 is to wear shoes that are as comfortable as possible. Once that starts no longer helping you sustain your energy, you can come on back to Booth 1763 and take a seat. That’s right—we won’t mind if you drop by just to take a load off in our pop-up classroom set-up! We’ll have a few tables and chairs at our booth and you’re more than welcome to come have a conversation with us while you sit down for a few and recharge.
Speaking of recharging, you can do that, too! We know that today’s connected educators love using their tablets and phones to take notes and post real-time updates to Twitter or wherever else. We also know that leads to some quick draining batteries. So, as long as you have the cable, we should have some vacant ports for you to get some Apple juice and charge that device back up. Especially if you’re leaving Exhibit Hall 3 after a session, we’re very close by, so don’t be afraid to stop. You can join our Ozobots in one of our charging ports while we answer all your EdTech, PBL, and STEM-related questions.
And, maybe you’ll even feel like taking a break from the everyday ISTE workshops and sessions. If you want to try something new, hands-on, and exciting, our booth is where you need to be. We mentioned the interactive virtual reality demo, but we’ll also have a number of different tech toys and tools ready for play in our EdTech playground! We can guarantee you’ll find something you’ve never heard of before or at least never used before among the technologies at our spot. We’ll even teach you how you can take a break from your EdTech research and acquisition process as our experts specialize in doing the grunt work for you. We know where to look for the latest STEM tools and now you know where to look and why you should find us at ISTE this week!
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