Fellow Followers

here is a mosaic that shows everyone I am following on Twitter.  It doesn't look accurate but it's still cool!

Get your twitter mosaic here.

Digging Deeper Into ITEC 2010

About 1 week ago I attended & presented at the #ITEC10 conference in Coralville,IA. This was my 1st conference of any type that I attended or presented at.  I am planning on going next year.

When I 1st arrived at ITEC the hotel was bigger than I in pictured.  It was a very nice Marriott attached to a convention center that also seemed quite big.  One of the 1st people I saw when I arrived was Mrs. Goerend.  When Molly (co-presenter) & I were walking down the hall to our room before lunch we passed about 5 BIG rooms that could hold 100-200 people.  That was really scary because I thought there were only 7 total presenters per day.  I also started to think that Mr. Goerend was lying (just to make us less nervous) about the size of our room being small.

We (Molly & I) met up with Mr. G and went to lunch, which by the way, was too fancy for my liking.  Also to my squandering knowledge of conferences there was a vendor hall with 75+ vendors.  That was my favorite part.  Somehow every single one of them heard that I was coming and brought plenty of chocolate candy.

As people were entering our conference and we were in the room I was talking with people I knew because I had to occupy myself so I wouldn't be nervous.  Once we got past the 1st 2 slides everything went great!

On the beginning slides I forgot to mention some of my "roll playing" and why they were something to have on a blog.  The discussions that we had planned to be 2-3 minutes long were easily 7-10 minutes long.  There was lots of great discussion and @mctownsley was tweeting out some memorable quotes.  I also met a person that went to high school with my principal.  at the end of the presentation after our thankings and resources slide there was a "surprise" public thanks to Mr. G for helping us do all this.

That night I had 30+ Twitter mentions and had 2 quotes on @angelamaiers top 10 quotes list.

At the end of this I realized 3 things. 1.I LOVE conferences!!  2.I accidentally took the spotlight for most of it leaving Molly on the edge a bit. and 3.I am coming to this next year!

In case you'd like to get some insight of what I'm talking about here is the set of slides we used.

What was ITEC?

        1. #ITEC10 was a little conference put together by 5 old college friends with 10-15 presenters.

• It was humongous with about 20 different conference rooms all running at the same time.
• There was a vendor hall with over 75 vendors.
• There were easily 300 people at lunch on Monday.

        

2. The only presenters there were a bunch of no-name people.

• I was there. ;)
• There were 2-4 BIG conference rooms that seat about 200, That were used all day.
• They flew 2 people in on Sunday to start it off on a good note.

        3. It was held in a cheap, old hotel where the wi-fi went out twice.

• The hotel was no more than 2 years old.
• The convention center was state-of-the-art.
• There was great coverage, everywhere!

       4. It was a great conference where learning was constantly available and no one felt limited to the opportunities available!

Schools In Need!

This is a program That Iowa Windstream has put together.  The website is HERE to vote.  It is the exact same thing as the Pepsi Refresh program but smaller & just with 8 rural Iowan cities.  You don't need an account or anything to vote & you can vote once a day.

You can vote for what ever you like or not at all but I REALLY  urge you to vote for Charter Oak-Ute Elementary School.
"Charter Oak-Ute Elementary serves ages 4-12. It wants to give 21st century learners access to 21st century technology. Over half of the rural school's population is on free or reduced lunch. Funding is tight. Their computer lab, shown above, is no longer functioning. They need a new lab to give their students a 21st century learning environment." Iowa WindStream Website.

Charter Oak-Ute Elementary Computer lab

Like I said before you do not have to vote for them, you do not have to vote at all but I really encourage everyone to participate.

Puzzle Experiment Conclusion

As some may know part of the Scientific Process is to communicate, so I took the time to blog my conclusion from a science experiment.

In my Experiment I wondered how long it would take on average to complete a 24-piece puzzle.  I learned that the more often you complete the same puzzle the faster you are able to complete it.

My Hypothesis was, "How long does it take to put together a 24-piece puzzle?"  The average time was 2:05 minutes.  I proved my hypothesis incorrect because I guesstimated it would take 5 minutes.  It only took approximately 2.

Please Excuse the horrible handwriting & words on the back.