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TIES – Final thoughts

A few final notes about the TIES

conference


  1. The highlight of the conference for me was the hour I got to spend hanging

out with Dr.

Jim Hirsch

, Assistant Superintenent for Technology and Academic Services,

Plano (TX) Independent School District. Jim and I talked about a variety of

topics, including the need for better technology leadership training for K-12

administrators (surprise!), the difficulty of influencing policymakers, and the

potential power of federal (or foundation) investment in free, high-quality,

wiki-based, multimedia textbooks. I’ll blog on this latter issue sometime

soon.

  • As you know, I like to brag about the people and organizations that
  • intersect with CASTLE. Two of

    our alumni were honored at the TIES conference. Matt Oswald, a math

    teacher at Stillwater (MN) Area High School and a member of our third School

    Technology Leadership cohort, was recognized as a TIES

    Exceptional Teacher

    this year. Lisa Finsness, Director of Instructional

    Media and Technology for the Osseo (MN)

    Area Schools

    and a member of our first cohort, was selected as the TIES / Palm,

    Inc. District Technology Leader

    of the year. Kudos to both Lisa and

    Matt!

  • Tim Wilson noted that TIES was very
  • Web 1.0

    : very few folks tagging or blogging along with the conference. I

    agree with him that this was disheartening. As Amy Hendrickson noted in her comment to Tim’s

    post

    (about my administrative

    blogging session

    ), many attendees are just now learning what blogs are, how

    they work, etc. These folks are the ones that actually attended our state ed

    tech conference; I shudder to think about the folks that didn’t even come.

  • Finally, several people, including Doug
  • Johnson

    and Miguel

    Guhlin

    , said really nice things about my TIES presentations.

    Thanks.

    That’s it from me for this year’s conference. We’ll see where we are next

    year at this time!


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