Getting Excited for ISTE 2014

In less than a week, Diana Neebe and I will be headed to Atlanta for ISTE 2014. This will be my third ISTE and Diana's first, but despite being a newbie she is going to rock Atlanta.  Months ago, I encouraged Diana to apply for the ISTE Outstanding Young Educator Award, and though the competition was fierce I'm sure, my awesome writing partner turned in a fabulous application and won the award. As a result of that, our schedule is now packed from Saturday through Tuesday.

Diana will be on the panel for the Leadership Town Hall Saturday morning.  I'll give my ignite session as part of the afternoon Opening Ignite Sessions and Saturday evening Diana gets interviewed onstage in the opening general session.

Sunday we will be eating well at the luncheon for ISTE award winners and then eating well again at a variety of parties, meet-ups, and dinners in the evening.  Monday we have breakfast with Google Developers and end the day with some Edtech Karaoke.

Tuesday we present our own session, Power Up PD: Top 10 Workshops for 1:1. It's based on the workshops Diana developed from the outline of our book and it is going to be a dense hour of learning, we hope, for our participants.

Other highlights I'm looking forward to are the ISTEunplugged events, particularly the Friday unconference, hanging out in the bloggers cafe, walking the exhibit hall, and of course going to at least a few sessions. Seeing friends and learning about what's new are essential parts of an ISTE conference for me. I'm excited to share all of that with Diana.

Book Proposal Sent

Book Proposal: Power Up

I hit the send button several dozen times a day, but this one was different. This was an email to an editor at an educational publisher. Now the fate of our book is in his hands.

It was actually ready to go yesterday, but Diana thought it was bad luck to send it on the 13th, even though it was a Tuesday. I humored her and we waited, but hitting send still feels like one of those tiny moments that can have huge consequences.

We sent an outline, several sample chapters, our cover letter, our CV's, lists of similar (but not identical) publications and a link to The Horizon Report. All of it was meticulously read and reviewed by both of us and several friends

We really like this publisher and we hope they like our book, but I know there are others who will want it if we get rejected this first time. So, we will keep writing while we wait for an answer. We know this is a book teachers need and we have to be sure they get it.