TRETC 2009

TRETC (Three Rivers Educational Technology Conference) 2009 was a huge success and most definitely a lot of fun.  Last year, I had the privilege of having the “Presenter” status on my tag.  I gave a presentation on creating a 21st century student technology leadership team in schools. (See this post).  This year, I had the “Exhibitor” status.
I got to demo two Web 2.0 products, Quizlet and Webnotes, in the Digital Playground.  The Digital Playground was new for this year, and I have to say, it was interesting idea.  Unfortunately, it was given a bad location and many folks didn’t really know what they were supposed to “do” there.  To many, it looked like just some more vendor tables.  That was the problem with it.  If the technology council can integrate some more students next year to show off some of their favorite tools, sort of like I did today, I think the Playground will be much more successful.

The two keynote speakers, Hall Davidson the Director of the Discovery Education Network, and Milton Chen, the Executive Director for Edutopia, both gave fantastic presentations.  Halls was slighty more engaging and humorus, but that’s probably because Milton had to be Skyped in from California because he was too ill to make it to Pittsburgh.  Hall used a piece of Web 2.0 software, PollEverywhere, in his keynote.  It’s one of the coolest pieces of software I’ve ever seen.  It allows you to conduct live, real-time polls via text message and it shows the results coming in, in real-time.  Needless to say, I created an account when I got home and I’ll be using it to impress a professor or two at RMU.  PollEverywhere follows the fremium model, so go check it out.

When not presenting in the Digital Playground, I was able to attend two sessions.  The first session was called “Cloud Computing – Teaching and Learning With Web 2.0.”  It was presented by an Apple Distinguished Educator and Google Certified Teacher, Dr. Chris Penny.  I learned about a super cool new presentation software called Prezi.  It will completely redefine how you think about presentations.  No more slides.  No more bullets.  It’s a large canvas that rotates and spins to show your content.  Super cool.  Again, it follows the fremium model, so go check it out!  The second session was called “Social Tools for Collaboration” and was presented by Mr. Rich Platts and Mr. Ben Alhtof.  I didn’t know Ben, but Rich and I had been communicating on Twitter for some time.  He’s a super nice guy and a very dedicated teacher.  He gave a great overview on Twitter.  Check out his site here.

So overall, TRETC was great yet again and so was the food/dessert served for lunch.  For those of you who took my business card, please feel free to keep in touch.  Subscribe to the feed to get all of my latest entries pushed right out to you.

Did you attend TRETC?  Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

SPECIAL WEBNOTES OFFER FOR TRETC ATTENDEES
http://webnotes.net

Use the code “TRETC” at checkout to get 50% off