Two days ago, I travelled with my colleague, Mary, to an OATS (Oregon Academic Technology Society) meeting up in Portland. It was hosted by Shawn at Concordia. Fortunately, we arrived much earlier than expected--traffic was light--so we were able to check out the local flowers and iris.
We were also able to check out the building where one of our graduate students will soon be working!
The meeting went quite well. There were eighteen of us from at least five different K-12 schools and school districts as well as five different universities in the state. Lots of discussion was had after some great presentations by Alyssa.
The takeaways were multiple for me:
- It was nice to get out of Monmouth and meet with colleagues.
- It was very nice to talk tech with people I don't normally know--this gives some new and aded perspectives.
- It's worth investing time to create the networks necessary to support groups like OATS.
As a result, I managed to get a Twitter feed for OATS started and a Facebook group page. There's other work to do, such as making sure people use/participate in these locations, but that will come in the future, I think!