12th Teacher Networking Technology and Content (TNTc) Conference

This was my first time attending a TNT conference and this one was the 12th!!! From now on I am not going to miss any future TNT conference. They are very informative and not matter how technology savvy you are, even if you now a lot or if you have plenty of experience in this field, at the end of the day you leave whit a very good taste and as I said, even if you have a lot of experience on technology you learned a lot. As you know technology is continuously growing at a very fast pace. I could not say that it grows every year, because companies keep releasing amazing technology through the year. I was not familiar with this conference I thought that we were going to be all in one room discussing about new technology and innovations, but that was not the case, you can attend to all of these available sessions from different presenters. It is hard to pick your sessions since they all very attractive. I guess it all depends on the technology you would like to start implementing in your classroom; those are the sessions you would attend.

My first session was the apple company. Apple as you can see is a company that quality is one of their primary requirements. I have not found an apple product were quality was poor. Another reason why I chose the Apple guys was because apple also focuses on the end user, and they always try to make their interfaces as user friendly as possible. On the apple session they showed us different products one of them was Apple TV which one of its many features that I liked the most is that you can wirelessly stream your videos, photos, movies and you can actually mirror your ipad into a TV. They gave us a website where you can schedule to free workshops about their different products. The URL is apple.com/cielovista. You can also register to a 1 to 1 membership where they basically give personal workshops on any apple product you have bought. The membership costs $99 dlls. They also have free field trips and camps, which they are also for free. You have to keep an eye on their website to check when the next available field trip or camp would be. They also handed several iPad for us to play with.

After the apple session I went to the keynote presentation. He talked about many things but one of the things that caught my attentions is that this guy went to china recently and he bought an iPhone where you can actually have 2 SIM cards, which allows you to make calls from two different carriers. This technology is not currently available here at the US. He also used his iPad to show us how easy is to learn how to play guitar or any instrument. He actually played song for us during his presentation with his iPad.

My third session was about edmodo, an amazing web resource for teachers. If I get to be a professor sometime I would defentely use edmodo, it is a very user-friendly web tool that is similar to Facebook. I liked a lot of features on this web tool, one of them is that you can sign in as a Teacher, as student or as a Parent. All of these modes have their own interface, where as a Teacher you have more control. You can have as many classes or “groups” as is called in Edmodo as you want. You can register your students for your different groups; you can also lock your group so no one can register for your class any more. If your students are misbehaving in the comment sections you can actually set their permission to read-only. You can setup quizzes, polls, assignment, notes and you can also have a calendar. You can send notes or comments to an entire class, to their parents only, to a single parent and/or to another professors. I am amazed with this web resource, I highly recommended.

My fourth session was about games in Flash for android and iPhones. I have a high interest in mobile programming. I think a developer or also called programmer must to expand his knowledge base to mobile programming, because now it is not sufficient to only develop an application that would run only on a single computer, you would need to develop that can be globally used and I mean globally as other sources. In other words, your application has to be web based, it would also need to run on mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, android phones, tablets, etc, etc, etc. After attending this session I was able to see that you can develop mobile apps using Adobe Flash. Obviously as more complex you want your application to be you would need to know a lot of coding, but for simple and basic apps you can use this tool with basically no programming knowledge at all. Adobe representatives gave this presentation.

My fifth session was with the same guys from Adobe, and was about how to create an ePortfolio. It’s a very easy task to do, you can create folders and subfolders, you can run slideshows to showcase your pictures. You backup a website and import it into a PDF. You can easily create forms from Word and have it in PDF. One of the features I liked about Adobe is the security and the compression on the PDF files.


My sixth and last session was another web resource, which I was not very pleased with it. It was basically a tool to simulate post-its online, but the web site was not password protected at all, so all of the information is open to the public, the user graphical interface was not user friendly at all, all of the information was spread out trough on single page and was not organized.

One suggestion that I have about this TNT conference is that they should build a committee to approve the proposals, they should not let anyone to just present whatever they wanted, but overall it was a great experience, I would highly recommend that you attend to the next TNT conference. I bet you that you are going to learn something great at the end.