Ah, summertime – a time for rest and relaxation. For educators, summer is also often a time for professional development. A highlight of my summer PD each year is the annual CSTA Conference. I love a conference where I don’t have to search the program trying to find computer science sessions. With the start of the conference only a little over a week a way, my conference planning has begun!

Do you make a plan for a conference before you attend? I’m not talking about planning a session or workshop, if you are a presenter. I am talking about planning your experience as an attendee. I do.

Before going to a conference, I read the conference program and create a document of the sessions that I think I would like to attend. I include information from the conference program along with any resources that have been shared for the session. I also try to find links to the presenters which might include their Twitter handles, LinkedIn profile, website, etc. This helps me to follow up after the conference if I didn’t get information from a session during the conference. My list of sessions always includes more than I could possibly physically attend so I rely on crowd-sourcing to get information on sessions I can’t actually attend.

During the conference:

• If I am attending with colleagues, we get together to make sure to attend different sessions. Then, we all add information to a collaborative document for those sessions. I can then use that to update my document.
• I share my document on Twitter using the conference hashtag and ask for collaborators. This lets people who are in the room contribute pictures, notes, and other resources from the sessions that I can’t physically attend.
• I use the document to watch for tweets from those sessions I’m not in and add the information to my document as the conference progresses. If I see people tweet about a session without much information, I will reply to their tweet asking for links to resources so I can add them to the document.
• I also use the document to see where I want or need to be. I don’t know about you but often sessions at conferences can spark a curiosity that I didn’t have before. This means I might want to change my mind on which sessions I attend as the conference progresses. It’s nice to have all the sessions I might be interested in on one document rather than having to click multiple times to see descriptions of sessions on the actual program.

For this year’s CSTA conference, I have included the sessions from the program that are applicable to K-8 CS on my document. I always try to check my document against the conference program just before the conference starts because there are sometimes room changes or cancellations.

Have you ever missed something at a conference that you meant to attend? To try to avoid this, I add any workshops, sessions, meet-ups, etc. that I am definitely attending, presenting, or proctoring to my Google Calendar. Then, I have reminders sent to me at whatever interval I like which is typically 15 minutes to 30 minutes before something is scheduled to start. This helps me to be where I am committed to be.

What are you waiting for? The 2018 CSTA Conference starts in just over a week. Create your own #CSTA2018 resources document for the conference and add your must attend events to your calendar.

What if you’re not attending the 2018 CSTA Conference? No problem, you can still create your own document of sessions that you would have liked to attend and follow along on Twitter using the #csta2018 hashtag to collect resources from the sessions. I have done this the last few years for the ISTE Conference, which I have not attended. It is amazing what you can learn from a conference even when you’re not physically there. Create your own #NOTATcsta2018 document and follow along virtually!