A few final notes about the TIES
conference…
- The highlight of the conference for me was the hour I got to spend hanging
out with Dr.
Jim Hirsch, Assistant Superintenent for Technology and Academic Services,
Plano (TX) Independent School District. Jim and I talked about a variety of
topics, including the need for better technology leadership training for K-12
administrators (surprise!), the difficulty of influencing policymakers, and the
potential power of federal (or foundation) investment in free, high-quality,
wiki-based, multimedia textbooks. I’ll blog on this latter issue sometime
soon. - As you know, I like to brag about the people and organizations that
intersect with CASTLE. Two of
our alumni were honored at the TIES conference. Matt Oswald, a math
teacher at Stillwater (MN) Area High School and a member of our third School
Technology Leadership cohort, was recognized as a TIES
Exceptional Teacher this year. Lisa Finsness, Director of Instructional
Media and Technology for the Osseo (MN)
Area Schools and a member of our first cohort, was selected as the TIES / Palm,
Inc. District Technology Leader of the year. Kudos to both Lisa and
Matt! - Tim Wilson noted that TIES was very
Web 1.0: very few folks tagging or blogging along with the conference. I
agree with him that this was disheartening. As Amy Hendrickson noted in her comment to Tim’s
post (about my administrative
blogging session), many attendees are just now learning what blogs are, how
they work, etc. These folks are the ones that actually attended our state ed
tech conference; I shudder to think about the folks that didn’t even come. - Finally, several people, including Doug
Johnson and Miguel
Guhlin, said really nice things about my TIES presentations.
Thanks.
That’s it from me for this year’s conference. We’ll see where we are next
year at this time!
