We are blessed in Texas to have one of the premier
instructional technology conferences in the world hosted here in our
state. The Texas Computer Education
Association, TCEA, put on a fantastic event in early February in Austin. For me the conference is a wonderfully exhausting
set of meetings, vendor interactions, and presentations. So I thought I would share a few things that
highlighted the event for me…
I started out the conference with an all-day meeting of
about 100 of Texas’ premier education CTOs, CIOs, and technology directors. The Texas
K-12 CTO Council (part of CoSN) is full
of high energy, collaborative, and super intelligent educational leaders from
around the state. If there was one
common thread throughout the day, it is that we are all facing a rapidly
changing technology landscape. BYOD,
tablets, online learning, and mobile devices are here to stay, and we all need
to embrace this change and figure out very quickly how we are going to leverage
them for learning, lest we become irrelevant.
Another significant amount of my time at TCEA was spent off
site meeting with the Texas
Education Agency (TEA), about how the agency can help districts
authenticate staff and students through their Project Share gateway,
allowing single sign on (SSO) for all state sponsored curricular applications. While this may not seem exciting, it is a
huge first step and one that potentially will save districts thousands of hours
of lost instructional time, as students and staff struggle to remember one more
set of login credentials. While this is
in the early planning stages, I want to applaud the TEA and Associate
Commissioner, Anita Givens, and her staff for listening to the needs of
districts, and following up by launching this long overdue initiative. We all want our staff and teachers doing
SOMETHING other than managing user credentials.
I can only hope that other states are this forward thinking in helping
out over burdened districts.
So you may be reading this and wondering if I got to see and
cool stuff or good presentations. I had the pleasure of presenting with two of
my awesome team members to a packed house on developing mobile applications
(anyone can do this – I promise). School
districts having apps may be a new thing now, but I promise you, in a few years
if you do not have one, you will be in the minority. Almost everything on the
floor revolved around mobile devices, and we all know that apps rule the roost
on mobile. Our presentation is freely
downloadable on Slideshare.
A couple of neat things intrigued me as well – certainly there
were some great devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy Note, which when bundled
with Samsung’s
Smart School, looks like a great start on a fantastic manageable eco-system,
where bundled with MDM, might offer make this a compelling investment over
other tablets or devices.
Finally, one software system that caught my eye, because it’s
emphasis on BYOD, was DisplayNote. While this is not an inexpensive solution, it
looks like a great way to unify a non-homogenous room of BYOD devices for
teachers and students sharing content and collaborating. While the app may seem
teacher focused, from what I have read, it looks like you could easily use this
app and have students share their work and teach the class or collaborate
together in small groups, using whatever device they brought to school that day.
While I have barely scratched the surface of a great event
in this post, I promise if you look through this list of the 2013 TCEA convention session handouts,
you will find some great things as well. If you had the pleasure to attend, please
tweet your favorite finds or sessions to @atemyshorts.
