FLVS Strive 2011 – Day 1

As I have been announcing for the past week or two, today was the first of FLVS Strive 2011.  The full name of the event is “Strive: College and Career Expo,” and I spent the day moving around from room to room – trying to interact with the live presenters.  As a matter of description, when you enter the “facility” you see:

Click on any of the images to increase the size of the graphic.

From this beginning stage, there are essentially four places that you can go.  The DREAMS AUDITORIUM is where the main or keynote (for lack of a better word) speakers are.  The first of these was FLVS CEO Julie Young.

Similar to the FLVS Worldfest 2010, the live opening was actually a recording (which was one of my complaints about the previous event).  From there I went to ACADEMIA HALL.

This space had topics such as Mythbusters, College 101, Curriculum Connection, Mapping Your Future, Where’s the Money? and many others (essentially each desk was a different topic).  When you click on the desk you get brought into a room where you have access to a series of video presentations, resources, and at different times access to live individuals to chat with.  One of the few spaces that was manned for the full day was the Mythbusters area.

Mythbusters
FLVS School Counselors
The FLVS School Counselors will be available throughout both days to answer your questions and provide information about courses, graduation, college and more!

One of the many conversations that I had today was with one of the counselors.  In chatting with her, although she had only spent a few hours in the space today (as the FLVS Counselors were taking shifts), she had spoken with about 50 different students.

The next space was the OCCUPATION HALL, which was divided into subject areas: The Arts, Business, Career 101, Communication, Health Science, Hospitality, Law and Order, and STEM – not sure where teaching fell into this mixture (see below for why I bring that up).

It was at this point, still fairly early in the day that I realized that many of the presentations were developed by FLVS students.  In fact, if you look at the program – which contains a list of all of the videos and resources in each of the areas – many of the session materials were developed by FLVS students.

The only real live portion of the session were the live chats – and there were a lot of them!

Here are a couple of chat examples, one in a general room and one with a specific individual (in this case, one of the folks from The Art Institute).  Beyond the static or asynchronous content, this was where the real action seemed to be.  I found it fascinating personally, because I had several FLVS students engage me in conversations.  They usually started by asking about what I was interesting in majoring in or if I had picked a college.  I always told them who I was and why I was attending the event.  In some instances this led to discussions with students about why they were enrolled in FLVS and what they liked or find challenging about studying in this environment.  The most memorable for me was a conversation with a young lady in grade eight who was studying full-time in FLVS because she was a competitive tennis player.  She said she would prefer to learn in a face-to-face classroom because she was more “social”, but FLVS provided her the opportunity to continue both her studies and her tennis.  In other instances the discussions were actually about my own profession and students interest in being a teacher.  The most memorable of these with with another young lady and her mother about her interest in becoming a kindergarten teacher.  Finally, there were discussions about instructional technology in general and where I saw different technologies going in the future.

Overall it was an interesting and enjoyable day and I am looking forward to more conversations tomorrow.