Wednesday… Hump Day. The day that folks at professional development or teacher conferences SHOULD really feel the drain of being out of their element… out of their own beds… their normal routines. Energy is usually down. As you can see below, that is certainly not the case at TeacherCon!

Can you honestly tell me that looks like a crew who is tired…. Didn’t think so! Here is the cool part… EVERY part of this experience is at this energy level. It’s contagious.

After our great kick off, we headed to a meeting with our regional partners. These are the people and organizations who make it possible for teachers to be here. They coordinate with the code.org team, they help the state work through curriculum and licensing issues. In all, they do all the leg work that often goes unnoticed. We spent an hour discussing implementation and strategies specific to our state, Mississippi. All the other groups did the same with their partners. To the RCU at Mississippi State, specifically Shelly and Sandra…. Thank you.

Why settle for one when you can have two?

We then moved into our TLO rooms, after a quick stop by the coffee pot. Here we watched and discussed lessons taught by teachers attending TeacherCon. We had the opportunity to work through many parts of the program, wearing our student hats. We dabbled in HTML and CSS, discussed copyright and fair use, and worked together in groups. Again, a productive day of learning a great curriculum.

After working through another scavenger hunt aimed at getting us familiar with the various ways to navigate the site and find information, we headed to our recap of the day. The most important thing to remember about this send off was that tonight we had our regional event. This was an opportunity for us to get together, socialize, and generally get to know each other. Of course, we had to take a picture. 🙂