Truger’s TechTalk

Now that I have had some time to decompress and get caught up on work I can now share more of what I learned at Il-TCE. Aside from the having most amazing workshop, I was able to meet the most amazing people. Many of them were fellow DEN members that I only knew virtually.

First on the list was Scott Meech. Scott did a great preso on Comic Life. Comic Life is something that my district is looking at adding to the standard load. I loved Scott’s presentation style! He used humor and strategically placed laptops to show just how easy Comic Life is. He handed out laptops and just told people to create! No tutorials…no hand holding just do it! And you know what? They did! It was just that simple. Ironically the two who had the laptops were PC users so they were also using Macs! It was so clever…SCORE for Scott! Of course Comic Life is now PC and Mac.

The second, OMG moment came while standing in the Discovery booth chatting. I looked up and saw this pretty blonde, she looked so familiar…hmmmm uh oh! She is looking at me….look down…..where do I know her from? ACK! I am so bad at this! Ok I give up….looking back up with a smile on my face to be friendly…she just looks at me and then all of a sudden…Anne?!?!?

OMG! Do you remember me? Tracy??? No Way!!!! It hits me! This is Tracy Kirchner(now Selock) from college! Tracy and I were little sisters in the same fraternity back at ISU in the early 90′s! We hugged and couldn’t get past how much of a parallel our lives had run. When I knew Tracy she was a small town girl who just wanted to get out and now she is a mom of two boys (me too) living in her same small town, but the irony is that we both ended up working in the field of Instructional Technology. We both have Masters in the field and we both are STAR educators! Talk about an unexpected connection! The DEN brought us back together and I couldn’t be happier! I am hoping that we will be able to renew the friendship that we had in college and get to know each other as professionals at the same time. If you read this Tracy….EMAIL ME!!!

My final unexpected event took place on the very last day of the conference during closing ceremonies. I actually won the grand prize drawing (Thanks to Lori who encouraged me to throw my name in at the last minute!) I am the proud owner of a new 77inch SMARTBoard….the utter craziness of this all is that I work part time as a trainer for the Promethean ActivBoard!!!

Like I said it’s been a wild and crazy ride!

~Anne