Recent news found on the MACUL Newspage reveals that this year the nice people from Tool Factory will be giving away an Olympus 5 Megapixel digital camera and several copies of their Tool Factory Workshop software (worth $200 apiece) during the MACUL Digital Photography Contest.
The rules are fairly simple. Visit the Tool Factory booth (#311) down in the vendor area, pick up one of their “loaner cameras”, and get a few tips on taking great pictures. Head out and take a few shots, then come back to the booth, upload the photos you took (like the Oscar Meyer Weiner Mobile I shot last time I was at Cobo for the auto show), and let the Tool Factory people show you how to touch them up. The top prize of the before-mentioned Olympus digital camera and the Tool Factory software will be given out during the closing keynote session, with 3 other winners receiving the Tool Factory Workshop software, one of the “most child-friendly office suite[s] ever built.”
Alright, so I’m a sucker for giveaways, especially when some sort of a competition is involved. That and with my obvious talent for photography, I’m a shoe in. Realistically, I don’t stand a chance (it took me 4 tries just to get that Weiner Mobile completely in the shot), but I’m excited to see what sort of shots educators take during the conference. I started poking around the Tool Factory website and discovered that the Tool Factory Workshop software is an impressive collection of kid-friendly office programs including database software, a word processor, an e-mail program, spreadsheets, banking, and more. Wow, quite the nice prize for 4 lucky individuals!
Can’t make it to the conference to compete for a free camera and software? Tool Factory and Olympus have teamed up to offer over 30 grants and awards annually to students and educators seeking to use digital photography in the classroom. Student contests, classroom grants, and individual teacher grants give any educator the opportunity to receive cameras and the Tool Factory Workshop software to enhance learning. Check out the Tool Factory/Olympus Grant program if you have the time.
I’m trying not to get too excited about the possibility of more bandwidth at the MACUL conference this year because I don’t want to jinx it! But Merit is providing high speed Internet and Internet2 connectivity to the conference this year. This means the videoconferences will have 1Mb quality instead of the 256K we had last year. Some of the places TWICE is connecting to are Internet2, so I expect great quality from the videoconference sessions.
I think it will mean much better Internet access for attendees, presenters, workshops, and bloggers too.
So be sure to pop by the TWICE room (W2-66) and see what high end videoconferencing can look like.
The Exhibit Hall is part of the MACUL experience. It is a great place to see new products, software demonstration and ask questions. You may even win a prize from one of the vendors. What some conference attendees don’t realize that the vendors contribute a lot to make the conference a success. Their sponsorships of speakers, contributions, and booth fees make the conference possible and reduce your conference fees. So as you’re walking through the Exhibit Hall make sure to thank them for being part of the conference and for their on-going support.
Jim
The indispensable “At-A-Glance” conference planner is now available for download as a PDF on the MACUL website. While I love being able to look through the registration book and get an idea for which sessions are a must see, it’s really when the At-A-Glance schedule comes out that I get serious about which sessions are a priority, and which become my backups. A shame really, as there are usually so many sessions of interest to me (since I teach across the curriculum). So many, in fact, that I usually have to miss a few highly touted and/or incredibly insightful presentations (I’m making it a point to see at least ONE of Steve Dembo’s presentations this year after missing them in the past).
If you do end up having a conflict in your schedule, and you miss a session, come back to the Conference Blog here and see if we’re covering it. While we can’t be everywhere at the conference, the bloggers here do plan on covering almost every major presentation as well as a diverse selection of the hundreds of other presenters. Check out the Thursday and Friday At-A-Glance schedulers below to start planning your MACUL 07 “plan of attack.”
Steve Dickie has an interesting post about his goal for the 2007 MACUL Conference. I think it is a great topic. Also, it is important to have goals and be able to tell you principal, co-workers and the public why technology conferences are important for educators. Some people who haven’t attended professional conferences think of conferences as time off and a time for fun. The conference is about learning, new ideas and new contacts. I think about what I want to gain from conferences every year. Sometimes my goals are specific. I want to learn about _______ . Steve wants to learn about web 2.0 and implementing it in his curriculum. Other years my goals are more general. This is a “general” year.
My goals are:
1. Learn two or more good ideas I can use in my job. If I learn more than two even better.
Seven years about I learned about using Filemaker Pro for instant web publishing. I still use the basics I learn at that conference for registration sites, book databases and more. My time at the conference was worth it just for those skills.
2. Make a new professional contact.
I can’t list all of the people I have met at conferences that I have turned to for help and support over the years. Some have become friends, some are peers I now work with and some provide great resources when I need them. People like Kathy Schrock, Alan November, Chris Turek, Andy Mann, Ric Wiltse, and many others have helped me so much over the years. I hope other people can say that about me.
3. Visit with my peers.
It is amazing how much you can learn from a casual conversation. A new idea, management idea, a project, hardware, software, etc all come up in conversations that can help you learn and/or avoid mistakes.
4. Be Challenged.
The best conferences for me are the ones that challenge my thinking and challenge what and how I am teaching. When you are very comfortable you most likely won’t change. Growth often occurs when you are asked to meet challenges. I hope to be challenged and energized.
Oh, I all most forgot.
5. Have some fun doing all of those things.
What are your goals? What do you hope to bring back from MACUL 2007.
Jim
I’ve been volunteering to coordinate the MACUL Student Technology Showcase since it began five or six years ago. The showcase is special to me because it gives us a chance to see multiple examples of how students are using technology in the classroom. Every year I come away with a new idea or a new concept for classroom use. The students do a great job telling their story.
I do need some help during the showcase. If you would like to help us out for a half hour between the hours of 11:00 to 12:30 I would appreciate it. Send me your name, school and email address along with the time you would be available. I will send the list to MACUL. I can’t promise, but most likely you will receive a volunteer t-shirt for your work. Wear it with honor.
Volunteers are extremely important in making the conference a success. Because the conference is so well run and so large, it is easy to think that a major company is running the conference. In truth, it is a dedicated group of educators that make up the MACUL Board, the SIGS, and committees that make it so good. If you can’t volunteer during the showcase, go to the conference volunteer page to see how you can help.
Technorati Tags: macul07
I like to have an idea of something new to look for/learn about at MACUL. Last year I didn’t have anything, but the year before was the year of RSS. I learned so much and I now read RSS feeds every day. This year I want to see how other educators are using Web 2.0 in their curricula. Specifically I’ll be looking for ways I can use it in Science classes. The idea of Web 2.0 is old enough now that I’m sure there are some great educational applications out there I can put to use.
If you ask any of my colleagues they’ll tell you I’m all about technology in my teaching, but I still haven’t settled on a way to use the read-write web effectively in my teaching.
So, that’s my goal for this year. What’s yours?
Hot off the heels of yesterday’s fantastic discussion, and implementation, of the Guerrilla Sessions idea, comes a tiny little request to all of those educators, techies, and writers that will be blogging at this year’s conference. IF you happen to be blogging at the conference as a presenter, attendee, or a keynote speaker, please use the following words to tag your blog posts, so that it’s easier to find them using Technorati or other blog search engines:
macul07
macul precon
There, now wasn’t that the tiny little request I said it would be? By using the macul07 or macul precon tags, we can help those searching on aggregation sites or blog search engines find conversations, discussions, and thoughts shared on blogs throughout the Internet as soon as they are published. What does that mean? If you go to Technorati and do a search for “macul07″ in tags you’ll find a small, but growing number of conversations about the conference at a number of different blogs.
Once you get to the conference, feel free to tag your posts with whatever tags make sense, but please consider also tagging everything with “macul07″ as well. And if you’re not sure how to tag your post, simply mention the word MACUL or MACUL07 somewhere in the body of your post and Technorati will pick it up 
There may be something new to see at this year’s MACUL. The folks over at Geek!Ed!, a great podcast by educators, have been floating the idea of breakout sessions that aren’t on the schedule. The original idea was to steal a room that was not in use and have the session travel from vacant room to vacant room, but they may now be officially sanctioned by the MACUL leadership.
The general idea is to have a room for people who didn’t get accepted for a session, didn’t have time to get the proposal in, came up with a good idea after the very early proposal deadline, or discovered some cool new technology that didn’t exist before the deadline to come and share their ideas with other educators. Thinking about the new ideas/technologies bit really gets me excited. For example, if someone has come up with some great uses for Yahoo Pipes in education there won’t be any formal sessions on it until next year. This means I wouldn’t be able to implement it until the beginning of the 2008-2009 school year, by which point the technology will be over two years old and may have been replaced by something else.
The MACUL Conference is great, but due to the scheduling requirements dictating the early session submission dates we often don’t get many session on the really cool cutting edge technologies or educational uses of those technologies. I think the idea of guerrilla sessions could add yet one more really cool thing to the conference and give me yet another reason to wish I could be in twelve places at once.
Hopefully they manage to get this set up officially and it appears in the conference book, otherwise I’ll have to search until I find it. This could be a lot of fun and be a great chance to learn some more great stuff.
Pre-conferences at MACUL are always one of my highlights. If you have not signed up for a pre-conference do it now, as they often fill up quickly especially if it is a popular speaker or topic. I am going to attend the iLife sessions with Leslie Fisher. I first met her about 6 years ago when she presented at the Classroom Connect conference in Chicago. She is energetic and always has great ideas for integrating technology into the classroom. In this session, she will be giving tips for using the iLife software in the classroom.
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