They will be coming at you quickly so you have to be prepared, how will you prepare to curate all those resources and great ideas coming out of the ISTE 2014 conference? You should have a plan in place so you can easily and quickly curate those resources to have for later, both for yourself and to share out.
My Plan
IFTTT and a Google Doc for Saving Tweets
- If you have not heard of IFTTT before, you need to check it out as it is a great way to automate many processes and can streamline your life. IFTTT (If This Then That) works by creating a trigger and an action. I will be setting a recipe up so that when I favorite a tweet, it will be placed into a Google Doc so I can view it later. A recipe is just the set of directions that will determine what happens. You can connect many services to it such as Twitter, Google Drive, Evernote and even Wemo (if you want to automate a process that turns on a light at home, which I have done). You set up the trigger and when it is activated, it will automatically complete an action based on how you set it up. Recipes are very easy to create and there are many out there already that you can just use. You can do the same thing I am doing in many different ways such as putting the tweet into a spreadsheet or an Evernote notebook (there are limits to how many items can be added to an Evernote notebook however, limited out before). I would play with the different options and find a way for you because there will be many tweets you may want to keep and you should find the way that works best for you.
- Previous post on IFTTT
Flipboard for Other Resources
- Flipboard is a magazine style tool that you can curate resources to be displayed online, embedded into a site or on a tablet. I am trying it out this summer as my new curation tool instead of Scoop.it (which started setting limits to the free side) and I think it has a lot of potential. You can easily curate resources into a Flipboard magazine using a Chrome extension from their site and you just set up the different magazines to help organize the resources. I am going into the conference with a couple of goals so I made sure to create a new magazine for each of those topics; digital citizenship and personalizing professional development. I have a couple others set up for the big resources we need; Google Apps and teaching in a 1:1 classroom. As people post resources and give me the links, I will just open them up and click the Flipboard button to send it to the magazine. Others will be able to view them using the App or by looking at them on my site.
- Previous post on Flipboard including link to my embedding magazines
Google Docs for Each Day
- One thing that I always love to do when going to a conference is to share out the ideas and resources I find along the way with others at my school. I also like to include thoughts and questions that may help drive us in our growth areas. I plan on creating a Google Doc for each day of the conference to help better organize them and will share out the folder with those at my school. I feel it is important that we share out our learning as it happens. Others will be able to follow along and can send me emails or messages asking for more information or questions that they have, which can help me focus on the needs of our teachers.
Blogging for Reflection
- This blog will also serve as a powerful tool for me as I will need to reflect on what I have learned in order to work on achieving my goals for the upcoming school year. I have made a couple of goals before going to the conference so that I can be more focused and the reflection afterwards will help me keep moving forward towards those goals. I believe that reflection is a very important aspect of the learning process and that without reflection, our learning may not be as effective. Hopefully I will be able to post a couple of reflections each day or at least once per day. I may even do a video reflection while at the conference if I can convince others to join in. Stay tuned….
Donovanscience 
I’m wondering if Evernote would be a better option for notetaking rather than Google Docs? Wireless access can be an issue at ISTE, even using mobile data plans, and is more of an issue in the sessions. Evernote provides better offline solution and you could then transfer across to Google Docs later.
Flipboard is my favorite curation method for conferences. I subscribe to all the conference hashtags inside my Flipboard app and regularly check it several times a day to update my magazines. I’ll probably also need to use https://tagboard.com/iste2014 as my hashtag search inside Fljpboard may struggle with the number of daily tweets once the conference starts.
ISTE is long days. Personally I would focus on note taking from sessions and curating resources; and don’t stress if you don’t have time to publish posts during the conference. I find that writing the posts later allows me to reflect more deeply than if I wrote during the conference. For example, the post I wrote on Curation ( http://theedublogger.com/2014/06/12/curation/ ) was published 10 days after the conference and during those 10 days I curated resources into my Flipboard magazine that allowed to reflect on what I observed.
PS I’ve been enjoying reading your ISTE preparation posts! You have been sharing some excellent tips! Great advice about getting TweetDeck ready.
Sue
Thanks for your comments.
I usually just enable offline for my Google Docs, already set on my computer and I will set it for the specific docs when at the conference but then I can still use it. I use Evernote occassionally but I find it is easier for some of the teachers I work with to just view the Google Docs for resources.
My only reason to want to do blog posts while I am there is that I want to get some ideas out of my head as soon as possible so I can focus on others. That is my plan but I am always open to plans changing, I like to call audibles.
Personally I prefer Google Docs it is just that Evernote allows you to quickly create additional folders offline. One of the educators at the last conference I was at used Evernote and then added them to Google Docs which she then shared with a group from a range of different schools and they collaborated on their note taking. Whereas I just focus on taking photos, uploading key points and photos to Twitter and then curating into Flipboard.
I like the idea of writing the posts while you are there and I have done it in the past.
Have a great time at ISTE!