Going to conferences is always fun. I love being able to connect with other educators and learn new things. When I'm attending conferences, my head swims with new ideas and strategies I want to immediately take back to my school and implement on Day #1. As I travel through sessions with my co-workers, we become giddy with the educational revolution we are cultivating. We gather resources like greedy little squirrels who are preparing for winter or the next conference we will be able to afford to attend. We collect our educational "swag" and leave the conference feeling intoxicated with our new found knowledge dreaming of digital resources and poster makers--our own little Utopia High School. Then, the first day back occurs and we get sucked into the grind of bell schedules, make-up work, testing, covering material and our ideas and the memories of the revolution we wanted to start----begin to fade. Why does it have to be this way?
In my new role as an ITF, I attended the NCTIES conference with a very different lens than I had attended conferences in the past. Previously when I attended as a teacher, I was always on the lookout for ideas and resources that would benefit me as a teacher, my students, and my classroom. This year, my approach different because I was viewing the conference on behalf of my entire school--all content areas and all types of teachers. Normally, I would have avoided attended sessions on Math or Science being a former English teacher because they did not apply to me. While this time, I found myself wandering into all types of sessions looking for resources and ideas to bring back to the staff. In a way, I felt like one of the "pickers" on the American Pickers television show looking for a "good deal" that would profit my teachers.
However, I'm now faced with a similar situation. How can I take everything I learned and effectively disperse and share it with the faculty? I've done my gathering and now I need to do my categorizing and prioritizing so to say. In addition to that, how to I take some of the resources I learned and share them with my PTP and will they see the value and gain the same things from there resources that I did? I guess that is my goal moving forward.
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