The Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) supports a special interest group–TEC-SIG— for technology education coordinators. It’s a wonderful organization and by far, the most active in TCEA.

TEC SIG is the largest SIG and was established in 1989 for the purpose of providing a means of communication between technology coordinators and administrators throughout the state. The organization furnishes its members up-to-date information on legislation, happenings within the Texas Education Agency, grants, and TEC SIG activities. Members share their own technology-related experiences at three yearly meetings in an effort to educate and inform each other on what is happening in the field of technology.

One of it’s goals is to To promote professional cooperation and communication between educator/staff and administrators toward realizations of sound educational achievements.

Today, it has taken a significant step towards achieving that goal!

In a recent announcement, the Vice-President of TCEA’s TEC-SIG (Tim Holt) shared the following:

Okay, here is the surprise I have been hinting about:

We know that many of you cannot attend the meetings. We have a membership of about 800 and about 150 come to the meetings.

So, as a member, if you stay home, what is in it for you?
How can you become part of the party?

Well, we are going to try something at next week’s meeting that we hope we will be able to do at each meeting:

We will stream the meeting live over UStream.tv for any member that can not attend.

With the help of Paul Woods, Scott Floyd, and Miguel Guhlin, we are going to stream Will Richardson’s keynote, and the TEA Update live to everyone.

Here is the site:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tecsig-tv

Bookmark it.
Watch it.

And even though you may not be able to attend in person, you may attend virtually.

Your participation is of course, and indication of whether or not we do it again. So sign on, even if you can only watch a little at a time.

Again, this is the first time we are doing this, so there may be a glitch or two or three.

See you on TecSig TV!

Here is my response….

Tim and Friends:

Will it sound too corny to say, “How wonderful that TCEA TEC-SIG, an organization that models cutting edge use of technology for educational purposes, is going to be streaming the presentations at the Spring TEC-SIG Meeting!” ? I hope not!

Will Richardson, the keynote speaker, first modelled the use of uStream.tv to a bunch of folks on Twitter some time ago. It was fun to learn with him as he learned to use UStream.tv in various projects and he invited us along for the ride. What a ride it’s been….

At a NECC 2009 session this summer, Will sat in the front of the room with two laptops, one of them uStreaming the presentation, and with the other, sharing the main points that were being made. In a recent post, Will pointed out that “Community building is the new professional development,” citing John Pedersen. He writes in his blog:

…the power of the Read/Write web is not the ability to publish; it’s the ability to connect. Broken record, I know, but tools are easy; connections are hard. And so the question becomes how to best help educators realize these potentials in the learning sense first. Because at the end of the day, community building has to become an integral part of what we do in our classrooms with our students, as well. We have to be able to model those connections for them and understand them in ways that are meaningful to our own learning practice. [emphasis mine]
Source: Weblogg-ed, http://weblogg-ed.com/2009/continual-collaborative-on-the-job-learning/

TEC-SIG, as an organization, has to model these connections, this building of community, and each of us, working together, can learn to connect online. UStream.tv is one of those methods, as is podcasting. Will’s wisdom is evident here, and I’m grateful that my advice to Tim–which was inconsequential in the work of getting the uStream.tv stuff going–will help realize connections with the TEC-SIG members who can’t be present–due to travel freezes, budget constraints, swine flu, personal tragedies, etc.

Colleagues, I have sometimes despaired that our state organizations and leadership were mired in the past. But time and time again, those fears have proved groundless. We’ve seen podcasting (Anita Givens and Karen Kahan) encouraged as a way to extend the impact of critical information we all need prompt access to, legislative advocacy (Jennifer Bergland and Kari Rhame), and the use of social network sites like TEC-SIG NING (Karla Burkholder), and the ubiquitous calls to use Read/Write Web tools. Change is slow and woe to the person who tries to speed the process. . .yet as educational technologists, we ARE change agents.

I still remember the delight from Ysleta ISD’s staff when they saw a uStream broadcast of Anita Givens. It was a fantastic moment. They were no longer gnashing their teeth that they couldn’t attend, they were right there, with us, learning together, hanging on every word that proceeded from the mouth of Anita Givens. What more could one ask for?

With each connection, each small step forward we come closer to achieving community rather simply being a collection of individuals paying dues to a state organization. We are each called to be more than that.

As to TEC-SIG TV, I’m grateful that TCEA and TEC-SIG have finally moved in this direction. I’m proud that I can support an organization that embraces technology to transform teaching, learning and leading.

I hope you’ll share this news with other Texans and encourage them to attend the TCEA TEC-SIG meeting, either in person or virtually via the uStream TV broadcast!

You are also encouraged to join TEC-SIG! Membership is inexpensive and the benefits are great!

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