Annual conference highlights technology in education

The Regional Consortium for Educa-tion and Technology in Southwest Mis-souri will sponsor its 13th annual South-west Education and Technology Confer-ence March 5-6. The conference is de-signed "to showcase best practices in educational technology to area educators and offer professionals an opportunity to meet and exchange ideas on the present and future of educational technology," said Julie Holloway, director of RCET-SW, which is located at 1418 Pythian.

The conference is open to educators and members of the business community who wish to pay and attend. Holloway said although priority will be given to educators for preconference workshops, "The conference is an excellent opportunity for the business community to learn about the issues facing schools in their area regarding technology implementation and for them to interact one-on-one with educators."

She added, "Many types of educators attend the conference, including administrators, tech directors, and post-secondary, but the largest audience is K-12 teachers. We think this is important be-cause our conference is one of the few targeted toward and attended primarily by classroom teachers. Teachers are the single most important element for successful integration of any tool or strategy into the classroom, and they must be directly involved in implementing educational technology."

Although this is the 13th annual conference, Holloway said it will be different from previous conferences because of new information and industry changes.

"By virtue of the fact that technology is always changing, the conference also evolves to accommodate those changes. Innovations in hardware, software and Internet applications are on-going, and workshop sessions and vendor exhibits reflect that.

Student technology exhibits were added at last year's event and are back this year by popular demand," Holloway said. "An important thread' for this year will be distance learning/video conferencing/interactive TV networks (I-TV) with eight preconference sessions and numerous breakout sessions focusing on this topic, as well as attention given by Dr. Carl Hoagland in his key-note address," she added.

Hoagland, the keynote speaker, is the Emerson Electric Endowed Professor of Technology and Learning at the Univer-sity of Missouri-St. Louis. Holloway re-ferred to Hoagland, who has many years of teaching experience, as a "noted technologist in Missouri."

In his keynote address, scheduled for 8:30-9:30 a.m. March 6, Holloway said, "He will take a look at the relationships between the technology and the learner and will address the challenge of making sense of that relationship."

On March 5, there will be 19 half-day and one full-day preconference workshops held at various locations in the Springfield area. The actual conference on March 6 will be at the University Plaza Hotel, 333 John Q. Hammons Pkwy. Holloway said that attendees can select from more than 30 breakout sessions, as well as visit technology exhibitors and view a classroom of the future.

According to Holloway, businesspersons should understand that RCET-SW and what the organization offers via the conference and otherwise is important because, she said,"technology skills are no longer a plus in the business world, technology skills are a must for students entering the working environment. Those skills are sometimes self-taught but most likely are learned through hands-on situations in schools led by teachers. Well-trained teachers are obviously the first technology implmentation in the classroom. Ideally, a partnership between the business community and the school should exist in which resources are shared and all work toward the same goal of preparing students to be productive members of society."

A list of session titles and descriptions, as well as other information about the conference is available online at www. rcet.net.