The final preparations are underway, vendors are setting up their booths, and we’re putting the finishing touches on this year’s show.  The months of planning are done, and we’re ready to go.

We hope that you will be joining us for our 20th Ed Tech Day.  We have a great mix of vendors, presentations, and other activities lined up.

Thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make it happen.  This is truly the work of many people who have given their time and energies to put it together.  A huge thanks to Terry, Lisa, Lavina, Beth, Mark and Jessica on our coordination team;  other members of ITS, including the networking, telecom, field service, and business teams; the staffs of conference and event services, facilities, public safety, dining services and duplicating; our student crew; and everyone else who contributed, without your work it wouldn't happen.

Now, on with the show!  See you there!

-Dave

As we put the finishing touches on our show this year I've been doing some thinking about the show and how it has evolved and impacted the campus over the years.

I still find it hard to believe that this all started 20 years ago.  Quite a milestone when you stop and think about it.  Our Freshmen were not even alive when we held our first event in the spring of 1991.  Most of the technologies that we take for granted didn't exist in their current form either.  The computers of the day were the Mac Classic and the IBM Model 30.  

One of the things that I'm proud of is the way that Ed Tech Day hits on many different levels.  Obviously it is a place to see and learn about new technologies.  But it is also much more.  Professors assign their students to attend and report on a specific trend or technology.  Journalism students practice interviewing, event management students study the event's organization and execution.  More than 60 students work the event, experiencing first hand what it takes to put on a show.  It is a showcase for IC, with guests from just about every institution of higher education within 3 hours attending.  The local school districts send many of their staff and faculty; a number of BOCES vocational classes use Ed Tech Day as a field trip for their vo-tech students.  It's an opportunity for the campus to give-back to the community by welcoming local business and government employees to attend. These are just some of the many examples of ways in which Ed Tech Day impacts people throughout the campus and beyond, some of which may not be so obvious on first glance.

We hope that you'll join us for our 20th Ed Tech Day.  Although pre-registration ends on Monday, March 22 at 5pm, free on-site registration will avaiable starting at 8am on Thursday.  See you there!

-Dave
Dave Weil
Educational Technology Day Founder
Director, Enterprise Application Services

There are a number of stages to putting together an event like Ed Tech Day.  Lots of preliminary work, getting mailings ready, things organized and such.  Then there is the official first wave of mailings and outreach that starts to put things in motion.  People start to register, proposals for seminars are received and the pieces start to come together – which is where we are now.

The vendor registration is essentially complete and once again we have a wonderful mix of vendors.  Many returning friends and some new faces, too.  Check out the vendor page for the complete list.

And as for seminars – wow - the seminar program is the strongest ever with more than 55 seminars and tours throughout the day.  We expect to have an initial list posted within the next week or so.

A quick thank-you once again to Dell for their terrific grand prize for our annual drawing – a Dell Latitude 2100 laptop, valued at over $850!  We’ve given away more than a dozen computers over the years, a couple of large-screen TV’s and other gadgets.  Notifying the winner is always a fun part of this job!

But, before that can happen, there’s much to be done.  Please keep checking the Ed Tech Day Web site as we’ll be updating it with final vendor information and the seminar program within the next 10 days or so.  Stay tuned (and don’t forget to register to attend if you have not done so already)!

It is hard to believe that this will be our 20^th year of holding Educational Technology Days!  Wow.  That’s a long time.  I feel like a proud parent who has watched their child grow up.  

I recently came across the program for the first ever Ed Tech Day.  It contains ads for the IBM P/S Model 30 286 with 1MB memory, 30 MB fixed drive, 3.5” floppy drive, and running DOS 4 for the bargain price of $1649.  That amount today buys you something a bit more powerful. 

There’s advertising for the Macintosh Classic, and DIGITAL PCs.  The seminars (all 8 of them) included talks about the “Multimedia Classroom of Tomorrow”, OS/2, and AIX.  Hypercard and VideoDisc toolkits were being demonstrated.

That first Ed Tech Day featured 13 companies – last year’s had over 53.  We’ve grown from 8 seminars to more than 50.  And from a few hundred participants to over 1,600.

But even with that growth and the passage of two decades the basic mission of the event hasn’t changed – Ed Tech Day is and has always been designed to showcase how today’s technology is being used in and out of the classroom and to give people a glimpse as to what to expect in the future.  Today is yesterday’s future and the technology that is common place on the showcase floor was looked at as futuristic just a few years ago.  Take LCD displays as an example.  I remember when it was big news that we’d have a LCD or Plasma display at the show – now they’re mundane.  I remember talking about Bluetooth, or VOIP, or flashdrives.  All were “a technology of the future” at some past Ed Tech Day.

Through the years the event continues to showcase tools and technologies that impact how we teach, learn and manage our work.  We just have a bit more memory, a bit more speed, and for some of us, a bit more gray hair than we did 20 years ago.

Celebrating 20 years does have its advantages – while each year is a bit different, we know A LOT more about what it takes to put on a show like Ed Tech Day.  We have templates and outlines in place, and all the basic frameworks from past years that we can dust off to put together this year’s show.  But it is still a fair amount of work.  But well worth it.

We’re proud to have been able to produce these shows for so long, and to hit our 20^th anniversary milestone.  We hope you will join us for our 2010 event and help us celebrate 20 years of Ed Tech Day’s!