If you’ve been following along with our updates during the month of October (and, if you haven’t, you should really sign up for our newsletter), you know that we’ve been pretty busy. Every week of this past month, we’ve been appearing at events, presenting at others, and I think we even attended one or two as guests. Now that the craziness of October is over, we can relax a bit in November. No, wait. That’s not true. November is going to be just as busy. Oh well, here’s where you can find us!
Putting Your Tech Foot Forward
As much as we’d like to, we can’t claim responsibility for the clever title of this first event. That’s because it was probably conceived by somebody much smarter than any of us. Why do we say that? Well, because, on Nov. 6, we’re teaming up with the Museum of Science to host ‘Putting Your Tech Foot Forward!’ This interactive event will feature a number of new technologies with tables hosted by your favorite Eduporium personalities, also known as people you’ve never seen before! The event is taking place in the Museum of Science’s new wing and they’re also supplying some amazing speakers to discuss how technology is impacting education and how it will continue to advance a number of STEM innovations in learning!
Aside from a few intriguing presentations, this free event will include dinner, drinks, and the opportunity to try some of these cutting-edge technologies. As we said, the date is Nov. 6 (save it) from 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm at the Museum of Science. Members from the Museum of Science will fill guests in on their plans to construct a new Tech Studio as well as their Tech and You exhibit space. We’ll be there to fill in the gaps with hands-on EdTech demonstrations and helpful EdTech experts to answer questions about using innovative technology in the classroom. The night is dedicated to showing how technology can advance STEM learning and how the tools in our store help make this possible. It’s a great honor to be partnering with the Museum of Science, so we hope all educators in the area will be able to make it!
Speakers for the event include David Dockerman from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and John Richards from Consulting Services for Education and the HGSE. They will be discussing technology’s role in our evolving world among other topics. Guests will also have the opportunity to try various virtual reality and augmented reality systems, learn about robotics progression, and explore both 3D printing and the Internet of Things. This is a very unique opportunity to learn about some of the up-and-coming tools in the tech world and to do so in a prestigious and private space. We hope to see everybody there!
Merging Minds & Technology
The title of this next event sounds a little interesting, right? It could very well become entirely possible that this is a reality in a few years with the advances of artificial intelligence and all that other fun stuff talking over. For now, though, it’s just the name of one of our other marquee November events and it’s being put on by Learning & the Brain in Boston’s Back Bay on Nov. 10. We were invited to exhibit at this fairly prestigious event by Learning & the Brain and we’re excited to be able to attend! At the event, we are going to be hosting a demo of virtual reality equipment—namely the Oculus Rift—and some other innovative EdTech, including robotics and maybe even some drones. We’ll be there this coming Friday with our booth open from 12:30-1:30 pm and 2:30-3:30 pm, so come check it out!
This is our first time exhibiting at this event and there will be no shortage of prestigious presenters in attendance. Some of the headliners include Eric Sheninger, Mark Barnes, Caitlin Krause, Starr Sackstein, Monica Burns, and Shelly Terrell among many other distinguished educators and professors from both faraway and local colleges. If you’re not all that familiar with the EdTech landscape, the names we just listed are very, very well-known among innovative educators and we’re humbled to have been invited to the same event. Plus, there are going to be some big name sponsors present, including the National Association of Elementary School Principals, National Association of Secondary School Principals, MIT’s Integrated Learning Initiative, Yale’s Comer School Development Program, and Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Did I mention that we’re very grateful for this opportunity?
At the conference, which spans the entirety of Veteran’s Day weekend, attendees will have the chance to learn how they can use robotics to teach coding and 21st century skills, create engaging school spaces, leverage virtual reality to reach children, engaging students with maker activities, and a whole lot more. This sounded like the perfect place for us to set up shop and unleash a slew of cool tools for everybody to learn more about. While we do focus almost exclusively on using tech in education, a lot of our tools will weave their way into the mainstream world as well, so we’ll be ready to demonstrate how they can be used! Merging Minds & Technology is taking place from Nov. 10-12 and we’ll be there with some awesome EdTech tools on Friday, Nov. 10 from 12:30-1:30 pm and again from 2:30-3:30 pm. We hope to see you there!
NYSCATE Conference
Once we make it through the first couple of weeks of November at the two events above and other smaller ones we have sprinkled in, we’re heading back to one of our most frequently visited areas. The annual NYSCATE Conference is held every year just before Thanksgiving in Rochester, NY. It’s one of those places that’s really far to drive, but not far enough away to fly, so we’re loading up the car and making the 6-hour trip, arriving a couple of days before the conference gets started. That’s because in addition to exhibiting, we’re also hosting a pre-conference workshop! The conference is held from Nov. 18-21 and our presentation on virtual reality as well as our pre-conference tech petting zoo workshop are scheduled for Nov. 19! If anyone’s going to be at the conference, we hope you’ll attend!
NYSCATE is the New York State Association for Computers and Technologies in Education, an organization made up of over 25,000 members who strive to use technology to enhance teaching and learning. They are also affiliates of ISTE, SETDA, and COSN and work with many educational organizations across the state of New York to help get the best technology in the hands of their teachers and students. They also work with Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in New York, organizations that we have plenty of experience partnering with. They’re the people we want to be working with to provide new technology solutions whether it’s robotics, 3D printing, or even virtual reality. The crowd at this year’s conference is expected to be pretty big and we’re looking forward to furthering this partnership and creating plenty of new ones!
Besides our presentation, we’ll have a booth at the event with plenty of opportunities for the educators in attendance to ask questions and try new technologies. Even if you don’t see anything you think you’re interested in, we encourage everybody to try something new! The theme of the conference is ‘shifting gears’ and that’s exactly what we’re going to try to do during our five or so days in upstate New York. It’s going to be a very long conference, but one that we certainly know is worth attending. The atmosphere at these NYSCATE events is fantastic and the crowds they draw are unbeatable. We’d be lying, however, if we said that we weren’t going to take our subsequent Thanksgiving break very seriously!
Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference
In October, we exhibited at Massachusetts’ greatest EdTech conference (MassCUE) and, at the end of November, we’ll be at what’s arguably the best that New Hampshire has to offer. The Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference takes place from Nov. 27-30 in Manchester, NH and attracts hundreds of educators from the Granite state. So, while our Thanksgiving break will be short lived, we’re excited to head north and show how we can help educators innovate. We arrive in Manchester on Monday, Nov. 27 and get right into the action with a 6-hour pre-conference workshop that Monday. It’s called The Student-centered Makerspace as a 21st Century Playground and we’re going to show educators how the technology we offer can be used to create meaningful MakerEd experiences complete with plenty of opportunity for hands-on play!
Right now, registration for our workshop is looking good and we’re excited to get started. That’s also because we’re hosting two different presentations at this event! That’s right—we’re going to have a second presentation at the CMTC with an encore performance on the possibilities of virtual reality in education on Tuesday. We believe that this technology is going to strongly impact classroom instruction as we move forward and we’re going to show you why. We’ll have our top-notch Oculus Rift system for participants to try on the spot and it will even be at our booth for the remainder of the conference. If you have never tried a VR system like the Oculus Rift, believe us when we tell you it’s an entirely different animal. It’s not like those cardboard viewers—instead it easily transports students to exciting worlds they would otherwise never be able to experience.
This conference is designed to highlight the sharing of successful technologies for teaching among educators. We’re going to embrace this theme by allowing teachers to try innovative tools and offer additional advice for how they can use these tools to their fullest in the classroom. We’ll also be there to recommend products for all areas of STEM education, advice on integration tips, and customized solutions that will work in their particular classroom. We hope that everybody will come by our booth on Tuesday and Wednesday and that our presentations will be jam packed! This is one of our final big events of the year (thankfully) and we can’t wait to get started! For more information on the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference, visit their website.
NAMTC Leadership Summit and AESA Annual Conference
In June, we made the long trip to San Antonio for ISTE 2017 and very much enjoyed the city as a whole. So, we’re going back at the end of the month! This time, however, it’s for the NAMTC Leadership Summit on Nov. 28-29 and the AESA Annual Conference from Nov. 29-Dec. 2. We’ve gone to these two back-to-back events each of the last two years in New Orleans and Savannah and we’re ready to take them on for the third time. At each event, we’ll have our booth set up with the best innovative tech options for teachers. We’ll also be discussing how we work with educational service agencies to better serve the teachers who fall under each of them and how we can recommend technology to help library and media specialists deliver a relevant education to every student they teach.
NAMTC stands for the National Association of Media and Technology Centers. They are committed to leveraging technology in school libraries and media centers to create a more engaging and all-encompassing education for students. In recent years, this would have been confined to computing technology and laptops or tablets that simply give students access to anything they need to find on the Internet. Now, however, libraries are evolving and many even completely transforming into makerspaces. So, we can offer this audience a lot more of the relevant tools they are looking for, like 3D printers, virtual reality sets, robotics, and other STEM solutions. It’s always exciting to exhibit at this event and we’re looking forward to arriving back in Texas at the end of the month!
After two days with NAMTC, we’ll be staying in San Antonio to exhibit at the AESA Annual Conference. Educational Service Agencies (ESA) are groups that serve as buffers between schools and EdTech companies like us. We work with them to recommend tech products for the schools that they serve and they come back to us with what the teachers in those schools want to purchase. We’ll be exhibiting at this event from Nov. 30-Dec. 2 and our booth will include all the usual suspects—the best technologies for advancing 21st century education. So, whether it’s in a classroom, library, or makerspace and at any level of education, we have the right technology solutions for you. We very much look forward to wrapping up our busiest time of the year and we’re excited to get started at the Museum of Science on Monday night!
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