I had the pleasure of travelling to Niagara Falls with my colleague Jean Giroux to attend and present two workshops at the Bring IT Together 2019 (BIT19) conference. This is a great conference designed to bring educators, education IT professionals and technology vendors together. I attended BIT18 as a participate last year and enjoyed the whole conference. This year I decided I wanted to be a presenter.
Jean and I travelled from Peterborough to Niagara Falls on a cold and dreary Wednesday afternoon through the brutal Toronto traffic. After a quick stop late in the afternoon at the Niagara On The Lake outlet mall, we made our way into Niagara Falls for the conference. I have been travelling to conferences and to facilitate workshops with Jean for several years. We always have a great time and both of us have a passion for delivering (hopefully) useful content to our audiences.
I was lucky enough to have two workshops accepted for BIT19. The first workshop was EPC Peterborough's "Creating A Positive Digital Footprint". Jean and I created this workshop about 5 years ago and continue to update and tweak it as we go. This workshop focuses on to curate your digital footprint to help build your personal brand. It is a presentation we bring to schools around Ontario on a regular basis. It was a pleasure to present it at BIT19.
The second workshop was a new one I developed in concert with Carolyn Farrell, Supervisor of Learning Technologies, at PVNCCDSB. This workshop focused on the change at PVNCCDSB from Computer Technicians to Learning Technologies Specialists (LTS). PVNCCDSB is a school board I occasionally work for as an LTS and I believe it is a leader when it comes to leveraging technology in schools for educators and students. A couple of years ago PVNCCDSB changed the focus for computer technicians from a break/fix model to a mentoring model. Now Learning Technology Specialists will go into classrooms and mentor teachers, students and staff on technology-related topics like coding, robotics, G-Suite, green screen, interactive projectors, etc. These mentoring sessions can be a class full of students or a one-to-one situation with a teacher or staff member. It is a terrific model and judging by the response to our session at BIT19 will be something other boards consider and/or implement.
In between the two presentations I had the opportunity to visit and chat with the many vendors that make up the BIT Trade Show. A couple of highlights included a chat with Kristin Mogg from Spectrum Educational Supplies. For those of you who don't know Spectrum has been a supporter of LearnTechGuy.com since the start. She was showing me the K8 Modular Robotics Kit robots for microbit, the OSMO Learning Game System and the Bloxels coding set. Bloxels was really cool. It features a grid base that fits little coloured cubes. The cubes are different colours and in essence, they act as pixels. A student would use the cubes to build a game (think old school Mario Bros). Once they have laid on the coloured cubes in the grid the use an app to scan the board and it then translates your colour cubes to obstacles, rewards, etc. Look for an upcoming vlog about this one.
Another highlight was talking to the folks at Epson. Epson was showcasing its new short-throw projectors, document cameras and printers. Epson has always had some nice tech. I was really impressed with their new D-21 document camera. It had a lot of versatility compared to the old Elmo's I am used to seeing in classrooms. I would love to get my hands on one to demo for the site.
Finally, I want to mention Wacom. Wacom makes interactive tablets and pens. I have an older Wacom Bamboo tablet with an interactive pen which basically lets me draw in programs like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. I was impressed with their line-up interactive pen displays. They range from 13 inches to 32 inches. These are interactive screens that seat on your desk more horizontally and all you to draw with Wacom pen. I would love to get a hold of one of these for the studio as well. These screens are powered by your computer (Windows and Mac friendly) and seem like they would be insanely useful.
These are just a few products from vendors at the Trade Show portion of the BIT19 conference.
The Bottom Line
If you are an educator or involved in any type of educational IT then you should definitely attend this conference. The quality of the sessions offered and vendors at this conference are top-notch. You can feel the energy and excitement as soon as you enter the venue. The people who attend this conference are genuinely invested and interested. I can't recommend the Bring IT Together conference enough and hope to see you there in 2020.
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Disclaimer: All the opinions are my own and are not the views of any suppliers or manufacturers.