Bring ISTE to Your Teachers: Building an Exciting Local Conference

Outline

Introduction – 2 minutes

Summer PD – the old way - 5 minutes
Background about how summer PD and other district trainings were done in the past
Discussion of why that was so ineffective

What is GRITC? – 10 minutes
Overview of mini-conference
Planning, organization, registration
Working with community partners/foundations
Site selection and set-up
Getting buy-in from other departments

Building Excitement and Engaging Attendees – 10 minutes
Preconference marketing to teachers – engaging teachers before the conference
Fun activities during the conference – Twitter contests, scavenger hunts, photo booth, food trucks

Conclusion – 3 minutes
Bringing it all together
Contact info for follow-up questions

Outcomes

It’s not possible for a school or district to send all of their teachers to ISTE. Instead, we bring the excitement and professional development of ISTE to all teachers in our district with a summer mini-conference.
Summer PD used to be boring sessions throughout the summer that very few teachers went to. Many would sign up for them in May but few actually wanted to give up any of their summers to show up.
We reworked our summer PD to pack it into a four day mini-conference held shortly before school starts. This mini-conference started as a 2 day technology training but has now grown to four days of district wide professional development focused on improving teaching with a very limited budget.
The Gulf Regional Innovative Teaching Conference (GRITC – pronounced like grits) is an exciting mini version of the ISTE conference filled with engaging sessions, fun activities, contests, prizes and activities that make teachers want to give a few days of summer to attend.
The purpose of this session is to discuss the entire process we go through when planning the our mini-conference.
Objectives:
Participants will be able to:
- Develop a plan for their own mini-conference
- Share ideas for engaging teachers during the mini-conference to make it exciting
- Identify local resources that can make the mini-conference a success.

Supporting research

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jcal.12394#:~:text=Recommended%20model%20suggests%20that%20PD,Carlson%20&%20Gadio%2C%202002).
https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/professional-learning-learning-profession-status-report-teacher-development-us-and-abroad.pdf