The CASE Convention is always a great experience, in my opinion. Where else can you find most of the district Superintendents and their administrative teams in one place? Talk about networking! Talk about an opportunity to get a message sent! And then add the great hospitality of Beaver Run and you have the makings of a special experience.

This year's theme of "Global to Local: Bringing it home" was from Jan Henwood, our out-going Director of Professional Development at CASE. It was profound and inspired me to do my part for the event. My previous blog post includes a video from the Coordinating Council where we began the theme by having a Skype video call to Fuxing High School in China. A wonderful activity of the kind that I hope will become common-place.

We then had our agenda which included keynotes from John Medina and Tony Wagner who really engaged our attendees. We then went to a special reception in which we recognized Jan Henwood in her retirement... we tried to include a Skype call from our delegation in Washington DC, but their hotel blocked the Skype service. You know, it says something when a public school in China has more communication freedom than a hotel in DC allows, doesn't it? [;-)

But the real fireworks came the next morning as World-class edublogger and teacher, Will Richardson was slated to be keynote for the day and kick off our 21st Century strand. Will was stranded by the airlines and could not find another seat to get to us... this is the conference night-mare scenario. Fortunately, we had a spare World-class edublogger and teacher in the house. In fact, we had three 21st Century keynote possibilities in Tim Wagner (US Department of Education, Department of Educational Tedchnology) and John Kuglin (keynoted at a recent NSBA Technology and Learning conference). We decided that Karl Fisch and Anne Smith were our goto team and they graciously accepted. I'm working on getting the video to link here, so stay tuned. Suffice to say, they brought down the house and the crowd rose to their feet in the first standing ovation of the week. Just twelve hours from breakout to major keynote: these are teachers!

Here is a slide show of the event... I was pretty busy, so I could only snap a few pics, but hopefully you'll get the feel. I did not take the time to tweak the size of these pictures, so if your broadband is slow, this particular slideshow might be unkind to you (sorry).

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video in my next blog post!