As some teachers may know, the fall season means cooler weather, longer days, and all the EdTech conferences you can handle. Since we see so many educators at conferences during the months of October and November, we would not be surprised to learn you already knew that. And, yes, we are going to be at a lot of conferences over the next couple of months. We have our longtime yearly appearances at some events in the month of October and some new events we’ll be attending for the first time. If you happen to be at any of these conferences, we hope you’ll come find the Eduporium team and say hi. Chances are we’ll probably be holding an EdTech raffle, so it might be worth your time!
Greater CNY School Library Systems Conference
This conference season, we’ll be appearing at events all around the Northeast and getting started in Syracuse, NY early next week. In conjunction with our friends at the OCM BOCES, we’re going to be exhibiting at this conference, which features attendees from over 40 school districts! Most of the people in the crowd will be librarians from all grade levels and we are very excited to discuss some of the new technology tools available for educators to use in the library. Whether librarians have some tech tools already or want to learn more about what’s on the horizon, this is a great event for those in the upstate New York area. We will be running a booth and showing off some of the latest technologies to be added to our store—ones that help make STEM education in the library great!
The OCM BOCES is an educational service agency that serves the towns of Onondaga, Cortland, and Madison in upstate New York. They help teachers in these school systems discover and integrate new educational technologies in their classrooms, libraries, and makerspaces. We have been working with this particular organization for over two years now and they actually helped us launch our Tech Bundle Customization service. Back in 2016, we worked very closely with them to design 19 custom technology bundles for them to lend out to almost every teacher in their district. The bundles included something for every grade level and covered a wide variety of STEM topics, including robotics, coding, engineering, environmental science, and more. We’re happy to say that our partnership with the OCM BOCES has continued to provide both sides with awesome results and we can’t wait to get back to work with them at the conference next week!
Besides the OCM BOCES, they will be joined by organizations from several other school library systems in western New York to help host the event. The theme of this year’s conference is ‘Kids Deserve Us’ and will include a special appearance by author of ‘Kids Deserve It,’ Adam Welcome. Adam currently serves as Director of Innovation and Technology in a school system and has been an elementary principal in the past. Besides that, there will be a number of other educational vendors present and we’re sure that all teachers and librarians attending will be able to learn something new and find some new technologies to explore! Look out for updates from Syracuse as we make our way there in the next day or so! Follow both us and the OCM BOCES on Twitter for more.
ACTEM Conference
The ACTEM Conference is another one that’s turning into an annual event for us. Taking place this year in Augusta, ME, the conference will feature a number of technology teachers from Maine and the surrounding area. ACTEM (Association of Computer Technology Educators of Maine) helps STEM educators discover new coding and computer science technology and assists educators with classroom implementation of new tools. Since there are constantly new EdTech items popping up and we’re researching and vetting them ourselves, this is a great place for us to bring them to introduce the very teachers who will be using them to the new products. Since so many different kinds of technology, like robotics and circuit boards, can be used to teach computer science in modern education, the crowd at the ACTEM Conference is always eager to learn and we can’t wait to get there!
The conference is taking place this Thursday and Friday (Oct. 11-12) at the Augusta Civic Center. Besides the other vendors who will be in attendance, the event is packed with two days of professional development for teachers. This includes some highly anticipated keynote speakers, over 100 possibilities for workshop sessions, and close to 50 vendors who will be on the exhibitor floor. This includes us and we’re excited to be sharing that space with some of today’s most recognized names! Speaking of recognized names, the opening keynote on Thursday is being done by Holly Clark, a very well-known innovator and National Board Certified Teacher. Among her many endeavors, Holly is the co-founder of #CaEdChat, hosts an education blog, has published a book, and is recognized as a Google Certified Innovator. We’re definitely looking forward to what she has to say about tech integration to kick off the ACTEM Conference with a bang!
We’re also looking forward to reconnecting with some of our fellow NE ISTE members at the event. A branch of the International Society for Technology in Education, NE ISTE has a wonderful following and we have been affiliated with them for a couple of years now. Besides that, both days are filled with up to six hours of presentations and sessions for educators to attend. Plus, they’ll be visiting us and the other exhibitors in between. To get the second and final day started, another outstanding keynote address is expected to take place. Delivered by Joe Sanfelippo, an innovative superintendent, this speech promises to be great! Joe is the leader of an “Innovative District” and is constantly collaborating with the best minds in education to help teachers innovate in their classrooms. We’re looking forward to meeting some new educators at the ACTEM conference and, again, might have a raffle prize possibility in store for those who visit our booth!
MassCUE 2018 Fall Conference
Every year, starting in 2015, we have exhibited at MassCUE’s annual fall conference at Gillette Stadium. This year, we’ll be there again and we’re very much looking forward to attending an event that has become so wonderful for us. We’ll have a booth among all of the excitement and encourage all educators in attendance to come visit us! We have worked extensively with MassCUE in the past at various events and are excited to once again take part in New England’s premier EdTech showcase. During the two days of the conference (Oct. 18 and 19), there will be tons of professional development opportunities for educators as well as many vendors to visit on the exhibitor floor. We hope as many local teachers as possible can come find us at our booth as we’d love to establish some new connections with teachers in nearby towns!
If you’re interested in learning more about the conference before it begins, the MassCUE18 hashtag on Twitter has a lot of useful information. And, of course, it will be flooded with excited tweets from educators during the two days of the show! If some of the other keynote speakers we are going to be hearing aren’t good enough, MassCUE might just feature the most prominent. Headlining the conference as this year’s keynote speaker is Tom Murray, who is the Director of Innovation at Future Ready schools. If you’re an educator who uses Twitter, there’s a good chance you’ve seen him tweet or are already following him. He is constantly sharing valuable educational advice and information for teachers—much of which he gains as he travels the country speaking at various conferences and school events. We’re looking forward to getting to hear him speak and hope he’ll be discussing his ‘8 keys’ to transforming learning!
In addition to the traditional booths and PD sessions, MassCUE ‘18 is going to feature some other innovative learning opportunities. These include CUELand, student showcases, and a STEM playground among other programs. In the CUELand, attendees can discover tech and resources that they can use to support creativity and innovation in the classroom. The student showcases are going to feature students discussing how they are using technology to engage in their own learning. And, the STEM playground is going to be an area in which attendees can explore the latest STEM education tools for bolstering their hands-on learning experiences. As always, there will of course be plenty of opportunities for meet-ups and quick conversations as well!
CECA CASL Conference
Something else we attended for the first time last year and knew we had to be back for in 2018 is the CECA CASL Conference. CECA is the Connecticut Educators Computer Association and CASL is the Connecticut Association of School Librarians. Every year, these organizations come together to host this event at the famous Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut. This year, the conference is taking place on Sunday Oct. 21 and Monday Oct. 22. Like the other events we’re going to be appearing at, the CECA CASL Conference is also going to include some pretty prominent keynote speakers. The list, as of now, is headlined by Richard Byrne, Steven Anderson, and Kathy Schrock, all of whom are very influential in 21st century education. For any of our southern New England friends and followers, this is a great opportunity to meet up with us and maybe learn some more about how we can help you!
It’s also a great opportunity to check out a completely incredible venue if you need another reason to attend. Anyone who hasn’t been to Foxwoods before really needs to go and this is the perfect opportunity to do so. The casino is filled with hundreds of restaurants, shops, and beautiful scenery that you can enjoy before, during, and after the conference. More importantly, we’re going to have a booth at the event where, once again, educators and librarians can talk with us and learn how we can help them select the technology that’s right for their programs. We’ll probably be holding another EdTech raffle (hint, hint) and should have plenty of new technology on display as well, like the BOLT robot and the Root robot. And, of course, we’d love to have as many conversations as possible with educators to learn what they’re doing with technology and come up with a plan for how we can work together!
The CECA CASL Conference is designed for teachers and librarians in all K-12 grade levels. At the event, the various presenters and panelists will be discussing how educators can use technology, motivation, strategies, and resources to improve on their current teaching practices and enhance their classroom environments. At the pre-conference portion of the event on Sunday, there will be a number of speakers as well as a MakerMeetup and Speed-Geeking, which we assume is something like educational speed dating. On Monday, the exhibit hall will grow and more speakers will be on the stage as well as workshop sessions, playgrounds, tech talks, and meals. We hope to see tons of people stop by our booth and can’t wait for this event as well! Follow along for all the updates from the #CECACASL18 hashtag!
Erie 2 BOCES Conference
To cap off a very busy month of October, we’re heading back to western New York to work with our friends from the Erie 2 BOCES. Erie is located somewhere out past Buffalo or right near the Canadian border if you’re familiar with that country at all. Or, in other words, it’s only about a 7-hour drive from our office in Massachusetts. No matter how long of a drive it is, however, this is going to be a special conference for us. We have had a relationship with the fine folks at the Erie 2 BOCES for a while now and they work a lot with students who have intellectual challenges. At the conference, we are going to be helping educators learn more about specific EdTech tools and discuss how they can integrate them in the classroom. Oh, and we helped provide this BOCES with a huge amount of technology already, so we are very excited to work with them at this event and help them become masters of the tech they ordered from us!
A BOCES, or Board of Cooperative Educational Services, is a public education collaborative in New York State that functions as an extension of local school districts. A BOCES is able to provide services that school districts may be too small to offer on their own or that would be more economical to offer collaboratively, sharing costs with other school districts (taken from the Erie 2 BOCES website). The Erie 2 BOCES, for example, helps students and teachers from three towns in western New York. They often help find and recommend new EdTech tools and work with the teachers to help them integrate these technologies in the classroom more effectively. There are 37 BOCES organizations in New York and we have been lucky enough to work with a few of them, including at this upcoming conference, which we are very much excited for!
During the conference, we plan on working directly with many teachers to help them learn more about educational technologies that are new to them. Focusing on how to effectively leverage technology when working with students who have learning differences, this opportunity is going to be a new challenge for us, but one that we are very excited to be involved in. Whether it’s robotics, coding, engineering, or some other form of technology, there will be a lot to cover at this conference and we are working hard to finalize our preparations. So, those are some of the stops we will be making during the month of October with more to come in November. We hope you’ll find us at one of these events and, if not, keep an eye out for where we will be next month. Spoiler alert—there will be just about as many appearances from us in November as in October!
For the latest EdTech, STEM, and 21st century education news, follow us on Twitter and Instagram. Like us on Facebook, too, or sign up for our newsletter for our latest product announcements and offerings. If you have an idea for an Eduporium Weekly theme, send us a message on social media or comment below.