NECC – 4 weeks and counting

Generation YES booth NECC 2006The National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Atlanta, Georgia, is about 4 weeks away (June 25-28) and things are getting exciting! For Generation YES, this is “the big one” — the conference that we really go all out for. We even have a yearly “theme” for our booth. For most conferences, we don’t really do much decorating, but for NECC, well, we try. Of course, for us, that means imagination over money! But that’s always more fun, isn’t it?

Last year was our tenth anniversary, so we went to the party store and bought party favors and decorations with a Happy 10th Birthday! theme. That was fun (and cheap!) The Generation YES students are always the best decoration, after all.

This year we had a tougher time, but finally, Megan’s southern picnic idea won the day. We plan to buy a roll of astroturf (cheaper than renting conference carpet) and find a picnic table to use as a meeting table (cheaper than renting conference tables – see a pattern here?) We’ll be back at the party store looking for red checked tablecloths and picnic accessories for decor. We want to use part of our booth to set up a “drive-in” theater, with blankets on the grass and a film projector showing some great student projects, videos, and other movies.

And of course, students will be there to “walk the talk” of student empowerment and ownership of their learning experience.

Constructivist CelebrationThe Constructivist Celebration pre-conference event is completely sold-out, so on Sunday, we will be playing in the Atlanta Botanical Garden with almost 100 constructivist educators and our partners from the Constructivist Consortium. We have students from nearby Barber Middle School in Cobb County coming to help out and show off the technology skills they’ve learned in their TechYES class this year. Tech4Learning, one of our Constructivist Consortium partners, has already sent Barber Middle School packs of their software so that the students could practice ahead of time.

At NECC, we have a full round of events, panels, sessions and of course, time spent in our booth, talking to people about student empowerment through technology. I’ll put up another post with the full schedule next week.

During the conference, the Constructivist Consortium will be giving away some amazing prizes–more on that later as well, this post is getting too long!

We love meeting old friends and new, and NECC is always a great place to do just that. Hope to see you in HOT-lanta, as they say, so come by and chill out with us at the Generation YES picnic!

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