UCEA CASTLE Symposium

I recently spent a wonderful four days in San Antonio, Texas at the UCEA Convention. One of the highlights of my trip was spending time with Miguel Guhlin. Miguel and I had lunch together – he was gracious enough to take off work, drive me to a local eatery, and then bring me back to the convention hotel – and then he surprised me by also attending the CASTLE symposium. For those of you who are interested, here is the web page I made for the convention.

Miguel has blogged his thoughts about the symposium. He also created a podcast of our discussion and then added some additional audio reflections about our session. I thoroughly enjoyed reading his blog post and listening to his reflections. It was fascinating to hear his take on a conversation that primarily involved professors and doctoral students (most of whom, of course, are K-12 educators). Although we did the usual academic symposium thing (a panel of professors talking to and with the audience), we also shook things up a bit. We actually showed two digital videos (gasp!) and used student response system software and “clickers” to facilitate audience interaction and spark conversation.

Karl Fisch, thank you for your Did You Know? presentation. Consuela Molina, thank you for your Digital Kids @ Analog Schools video. We used them both in our presentation and they were big hits. Ten years ago, would I ever have had access to these kind of wonderful resources? Nope. And that’s one of the wonderful things about this Internet era. I’m looking forward to seeing what emerges over the next decade.