A Lesson Learned from a Small Workshop

Today, I had the opportunity to present at the ACTEM annual conference pre-conference. My workshop was designed to give participants ideas and tools for improving their classroom blogs, websites, and wikis. There were some excellent workshops being offered by the likes of Marco Torres, Wes and Sarah Fryer at the same time as mine as well as an all-day Google Apps seminar. There were nineteen people registered for my session, but only five came. In response to the small number, I altered my plan for the workshop. In hindsight, that was not my best idea.

In altering my plan to try to make it more personal for the attendees, I didn't keep the organization that I had planned. As a result, it felt like (to me anyway) that the workshop did not accomplish the goal of sending everyone away with a new tool to use in their blogs, wikis, and websites. All participants were able to see the tools in action (you can find them here), but my presentation of them was not what I had planned. Every experience can be a learning experience and the next time that I'm in a similar situation, I'll stick closer to my original plan. On the upside, we did have some good conversations about filtering policies in districts across the state of Maine.