Community Technology Night 2013

As with all new ventures, I was a both excited and concerned about our Community Technology Night.  I was excited because of the great information I knew would be presented but I was also concerned about the number of attendees we would have.  One never knows how many people will attend and we were more than a bit surprised at the attendance.  We had a handful of parents, our superintendent, and our school board president.
We could have considered this a failure, but it was far from a failure.  The evening began with some technology trouble shooting to make sure that everything was functional.  Lots of questions were asked, lots of suggestions were given, and a great deal of learning took place.  When our attendees left they said two things-

1. I sure learned a lot tonight and I'm glad I was here.
2. I wish more people had attended because this was very well done.

Two of our 8th graders, Evan and Dylan, did the majority of the work on this with the focus of sharing the great things we do at Merton Intermediate School.  We had both staff and student presenters and adjusted from the planned three sessions of 25-minutes to our attendees going from one classroom to the next.  The six sessions were 21st Century learning, Web 2.0 tools, Google, Communication, internet security, and Twitter.

Throughout the night I spoke with Evan, Dylan, and the staff presenters about the evening.  They were disappointed in the turnout but I came up with an idea of how we could share this information at another time.  In early March we have our next session of student/parent/teacher conferences.  The students have agreed to present again at this time.  Maybe the more captive audience will provide the student presenters with another opportunity to share their creative talents and the great things we are doing in Merton.

As the saying goes, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.  I'll let you know how our second attempt turns out.