ISTE 2013

Wow!

It has been incredible and I'm only a day and a half into it!  My brain is on overload and my introvert self is shuddering from all the people.  But it's so wonderful to be surrounded by like-minded people who get it!

Just some short impressions here, and I'll add more detail later.

1.  The opening ignite session was very cool.  Ignite talks are 20 slides long and I think 5 minutes--I can't remember the timing, but they're short and quick.  The speakers pack a lot of interesting stuff into it.

2. The keynote speech by Jane McGonagal was very inspirational and made me want to figure out how to gamify everything.

3.  Went to this wonderful session on QR codes and got several ideas on how to use them.

4.  Learned a little bit about edmodo and how to use it with other apps such as educreation and QR codes.

5.  There was another great session called 101 free tools on the web.  Can't wait to try some of them.

6.  I went to a short Intel sponsored panel, where I learned about 3 pretty cool free resources.  I'll post them later as I process everything.

7.  The people.  There are so many people.  All of them friendly, but I feel a little bit of the loner.  I don't really know a lot of these people from the twitter or blog world and being an introvert I find it hard to just insert myself into the situation.  This is entirely my own problem.

8.  San Antonio.  I have managed to boat up and down the riverwalk several times (I purchased a 3 day boat taxi pass).  I've had very good food at all the restaurants I've been to.  I saw the Alamo.  I went up in the Tower of the Americas.  My only complaint so far would be the heat and humidity.  I'm used to heat, but humidity is a rarity in Salt Lake City, so that is a little rough to get used to.

I'm waiting for all my pictures to upload from my phone to dropbox, and it's taking forever, so I'll leave you with one picture for now, and try to get some more up the next time I post.  I'm too tired to sit up and wait and I have a full day planned tomorrow!

Ballroom A, this is where the keynote addresses are.  It fits the theme of Texas Big, that's for sure!  Love the screens spread throughout the audience since the stage is so far away if you're in the back.

I'll get some more pictures and share more of the ideas and details later.  The list above will help jog my memory.  It'll be like a table of contents for helping me remember what to blog about for a while.

Goodnight from San Antonio, Texas!
Joell