SXSWedu and SXSWi
Early in March, a few members of the marketing team visited Austin, TX for the inaugural SXSWEdu and Interactive conferences. We had a great time meeting with educators in Texas as well as sharing a beer or two with the social media elite, discussing innovation and technology in education.
Education is finally starting to embrace technology as a necessity rather than as an afterthought. -Robert Scott, Commissioner of Education, during his keynote at SXSWedu
CUE – Computer Using Educators Conference
Mid-March we packed up our “Engaged Students Succeed” t-shirts, Collaborize Classroom mugs and a few laptops and headed to sunny Palm Springs to show off our free online learning platform at CUE 2011. We were greeted by hundreds of teacher’s eager to learn more about our platform, free teacher resources, lesson plans and professional development materials. Our team had an amazing time socializing at the CUE Tweetup and was blown away by the overwhelmingly positive response to bringing in-class discussions to an online community (in case we forget to mention it, yes, Collaborize Classroom is free).
Colt Briner also spoke at the bloggers lounge for the CUE Unplugged event hosted by Classroom 2.0 founder, Steve Hargadon on ”Blogs, Wikis, and Forums–Do’s and Dont’s for Engaging Your Students Online.”
Good Teaching Conference
While most of the team was in Palm Springs for the CUE Conference, Catlin Tucker was in Orange County at the Good Teaching Conference. Her presentation on “Revitalizing Your Reading Program” can be found on SlideShare.
Simple K12 Webinar
On March 15th, High School English Teacher Catlin Tucker and former ESL Teacher and co-creator of Collaborize Classroom Colt Briner hosted a webinar with Kimberly from Simple K12 called “How to Increase Participation and Improve Discussions.” The webinar will be up on our blog soon, but for now our SlideShare presentation of the webinar can be found on “How to Engage Students Online”
Collaborize Classroom Makes Free Lesson Plans Available to Teachers on Scholastic.com
Scholastic.com is known for being one of the largest publishers and distributors of children’s books, as well as educational technology. We were able to feature Collaborize Classroom and our free lesson plans and teaching resources on Scholastic.com at http://Scholastic.com/CollaborizeClassroom.
“We are excited about being able to extend Collaborize Classroom to the teaching community on Scholastic.com,” said Richard Lang, Democrasoft Chairman & CEO. “We have worked hand-in-hand with teachers to create this amazing solution and now it is very gratifying to see its use expanding across the country.”
OETC Seminar Available on Collaborize Classroom Webinars On-Demand Site
Back in early February, Catlin and Colt visited Ohio to speak about online discussions at the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference and the two-part video is available on YouTube and on http://collaborizeclassroom.com/multimedia.
Teach Through Technology SV CUE Conference
On March 12th, Colt Briner traveled to San Jose, CA for the 2011 SVCUE Silicon Valley Technology Conference to speak to educators in a presentation titled “Benefits & Best Practices
Online Class Discussions Done Right.” He discussed how teachers can get started in the online space and provided teaching resources which can be found on http://collaborizeclassroom.com/resources.
