Life on the road

Last week I presented seminars to K-16 language educators on the east coast. It was both one of the craziest and most rewarding experiences I have had in a long time. I now understand how musicians on tour mess up and say "Hello Chicago" when they are actually in Detroit. My trip was 5 states in 5 days. It was kind of nuts. I started in Burlington, VT. From there, along with my program manager/logistics guru, we drove to Manchester, NH followed by Waltham, MA near Boston. From there we flew to Philadelphia, drove to Cherry Hill, NJ and then on to State College, PA. Each day I presented a 5 hour seminar to some amazing language educators. While I didn't always know which state/city I was in at the time, and therefore avoided saying it out loud, I was so energized by the participants that location was completely irrelevant.

My topic was emerging technologies in the language classroom. While I covered more options than any one teacher could possibly take on, my participants all offered me some phenomenal new ways of using technologies that I hadn't tried out before. I came away each day with one or two more ideas and approaches. Web 2.0 is about a collective intelligence. That definitely came alive with the sharing and collaboration of my participants each day.

Since my return I have had contact with a number of my participants and I hope that they will keep in touch to tell me where they end up going with their new ideas. More importantly, I hope they continue to use our seminar website and communicate with each other. It's that collaboration and communication on a regular basis that helps us all with our professional development in times when funds are too tight to provide much in the way of opportunity.