ISTE July 1 Recap

 

Jennifer LaGarde giving her keynote
Jennifer LaGarde giving her keynote

A little slow on getting this one together – after ISTE wrapped up, I needed a little decompression time. This is my last of the daily recaps of ISTE – soon I’ll be posting my takeaways/action plans, etc.

The last day of ISTE started out with the SIGLIB keynote and breakfast. Jennifer LaGarde delivered an amazing talk about being Zombie-fighting librarians, complete with awesome graphics.  It was an inspiring talk that I’m going to be spending a lot of time thinking about.  School librarians are at a critical point in our profession right now, and we need to make sure that we’re advocating like crazy.

After the SIGLIB breakfast, I got hear one of my favorite authors, Sylvia Martinez.  A lot of her talk featured things discussed in her and Gary Stager’s book, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, but it was so awesome to hear it live and to know that for many of the other educators, this was their first toe-dip into the pool of MakerEd.    I got to meet both her and Gary Stager, and they graciously autographed my copy of the best MakerEd book ever for me.

Lisa Palmieri talking Hummingbirds
Lisa Palmieri talking Hummingbirds

I hit up the Maker’s Playground after that, and I really wish I had spent more time hanging out there.  I got to meet Lisa Palmieri (@Learn21Tech) and watch her demonstrate a Hummingbird TARDIS, I got to try out a 3Doodler pen, see Nathan Stevens (@Nathan_Stevens) in his 3D printed swag, and see a ton of MaKeyMaKeys in action.  I also meet up with my Twitter friend Allison Fuller-Mulloy (@AFMulloy) and we explored the playground some more, visited the vendor hall, and had fun hanging out and meeting edu-famous people like Tom Whitby (@TomWhitby) and Steven Anderson (@Web20classroom).

Hanging out with Allison Fuller-Mulloy
Hanging out with Allison Fuller-Mulloy

By this point, there wasn’t a whole lot of time left in the day, so I finished up by visiting the parts of the vendor hall I hadn’t seen yet.  This included spending a good amount of time drooling over the amazing furniture at the Bretford and Steelcase booths.  I love me some good edu-furniture.

Some of my favorite furniture.  Top row: Bretford  Bottom row: Steelcase
Some of my favorite furniture. Top row: Bretford Bottom row: Steelcase

Once I have some more time to process everything, I’ll be writing up some more posts about stuff I learned at ISTE, what I’ll do differently next year (Philadelphia #ISTE2015 baby!), and how I did with my bucket list.

 

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