At TCEA, we’re doing more than ever to meet the needs of educators and connect people from all around the world. No matter where you live, we want you to be a part of TCEA’s supportive community of education professionals.

And, for this week only, you can join as a new member, renew your membership, or even sign up all your staff for free.

Hurry if you haven’t already! Tomorrow is the last day we’ll be accepting new memberships.

Already a member? Fill out the form to renew for free for another year of learning.

Leaders – want to sign up your entire team, school, or even district all at once for free this week? You can do all that! Select “I want to sign up a group” on this form and follow the instructions for collecting your colleague’s information (with their consent, of course).

Not a joiner? That’s OK. You’ll miss out on the Lunch and Learns focusing on a variety of topics, miss out on wonderful, award-winning blog entries from the TCEA TechNotes weblog. Now, I know what you’re thinking.

“You work there, Miguel, of course you would say that,” you say. “They even publish some of your blogs. But is membership really worth it?” The answer is, “Yes, absolutely.”

When I started as a third grade bilingual educator in East Texas, I kickstarted technology in Mt. Pleasant ISD with the support several people. But the movement started in my third grade bilingual classroom. My students from San Luis Potosi in Mexico sang their hearts out into HyperStudio microphones, wrote and graphed their creations (The Graph Club) on the two Mac LC II/IIIs in my classroom (a portable building).

A half year later, I was offered a position as a district instructional technologist, became a TENET Master Trainer, and asked to present at the premier TCEA Convention and Exposition. What an honor. I didn’t know anything but I had the chance to meet fantastic, motivated people.

It was another age, clunky desktops, scarce access to the internet via dial-up connection, but it was magic for my students. Today, many educators only scratch the surface of what’s possible, caught up in test-prep, and other concerns. The pandemic has underscored the digital divide (an old term, of course), the gap between knowing and doing.

TCEA helped me learn more, to build networks and connections with people I never could have met on my own. Special interest groups (SIGs) expanded that. While you can certainly do much with social media, it’s difficult to imagine such a diverse community as what TCEA makes possible.

Now that I work at TCEA, I feel like an awe-struck citizen of Oz, seeing what’s behind the curtain. And, the as mundane as things are, it remains magical.

I hope you’ll do what a twenty-seven year old classroom teacher did so long ago, and join TCEA.org. It’s FREE through tomorrow (Friday, October 8, 2021). 

Open the door to possibility.