Four Presentations in Twenty Hours

     Today is the start of a busy two days for myself and Tyler L, a fellow student teacher. In November I shared that we would be presenting our professional development session, Connecting, Reflecting & Creating: Why We Blog, at the 2013 BYTE Professional Development Conference in Neepawa. A short three months later and the day is finally here! One thing has changed, however, our one presentation has turned into four!

     Tonight Tyler and I will be presenting at the ManACE Technology Information Night (TIN) on Celebrating our Blogiversary. We will be presenting a twenty minute presentation on the top 10 reasons why we enjoy blogging and how it has prepared us as we develop as educators. I am pretty excited that Tyler and I were asked to be one of the three presentations at this event and it should be a great way to kick off the BYTE conference!

     Tomorrow Tyler and I will be presenting two slots of our session on Connecting, Reflecting & Creating: Why We Blog: 
     "From being used as a reflective tool and a means to gain meaningful feedback 
      from peers, to creating primary resources that can be used in the classroom 
      and building a valuable PLN, this session will demonstrate the benefits of 
      blogging as an educator. This session will provide an overview of the many 
      ways that blogging can positively impact your teaching through first hand 
      accounts, examples and hands-on activities. You are encouraged to bring 
      laptops/devices but they not essential."
We've already had an opportunity to present this session to our peers and one of our professors at our university so I feel pretty prepared for it. The main change, however, is that at the university we had a two hour slot and at BYTE we only have one so we need to condense our information a bit! 

     Our last presentation is part of the Bits of BYTE online streaming sessions organized by Andy McKiel. Here is an explanation of the sessions from the BYTE 2013 E-Program:

Image Credit: BYTE 2013 E-Program, page 5. Available online at http://byte2013.wikispaces.com/file/view/BYTE2013.pdf/408348754/BYTE2013.pdf

For this session Tyler and I will be doing a repeat of our session that we are doing tonight for the ManACE TIN event. Both of these presentations are the same time limit so it seemed natural to keep them the same instead of trying to condense our other presentation even further.

     Overall I am really excited about these opportunities and am really looking forward to networking with all the amazing educators that will be in attendance. I've been talking to many educators via Twitter over the last year and some of them will be at this event so it will be interesting to meet up in "real life". After so long it will be nice to meet the "familiar strangers" of Twitter, as Darren Kuropatwa would say.