K20 Internet2 Days

Please describe your experiences planning and hosting Internet2 days around the K20 community. 

• Especially helpful would be event descriptions, links to event websites, agendas, speaker lists, audience information, technology used, budgets, etc.

WA K20 Education Network Internet2 Day - University of Washington, January 8th, 2007

• Event Website:  http://k20.internet2.edu/uwi2day
• Streaming Video of the Event - http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/displayseries.aspx?fID=2596&pID=342
• Budget documentation
• list of event planning staff - http://k20.internet2.edu/uwi2day/working_groups.php
• speaker presentations
• technical schematic
• for additional information please contact - James Werle or Connie Michener

Key Lessons Learned:

• • Our goal was to introduce the broad WA state K-20 education community to the WA K20 Education network and Internet2.  Toward that end, we invited K12 teachers, principals, technical support staff, community college leadership and faculty, public libraries, zoos, and aquariums to participate in a 4 hour Internet2 Day.  We didn't start marketing the event to K-20 practitioners until about early-December 2007 by sending a "save the date" email to a wide variety of K-20 professional listservs around the state.  It was difficult to get K-12 teachers to attend as they didn't have enough lead time to arrange substitutes, etc.  The holidays were a challenge as well due to vacations, etc.
  • The event webpage proved a very effective marketing tool.  It provided potential attendees with definitive event information including parking, hotels, updated agenda and speaker information.  We also used the website to track who had "registered" for the event.  Registration was voluntary but it did help to get a picture of who would be attending.
  • We had hoped for 1000 attendees but only ended up with about 260.  We offered "clock hours" as an incentive but only 30 people signed up.  Door prizes such as Ipods, etc. might have helped increase attendance.
  • Weekly event planning meetings were critical.  It helped keep the technical and content planning leads in synch. 
  • The audience really enjoyed the remote speakers from Cleveland Museum of Art, the InternationalWolfCenter, and Mote Marine Aquarium though it did add to the technical complexity quite a bit.
  • Gathering speaker presentations in advance then running through the program the night before the event helped shake out potential technical and programmatic bugs and allowed the speakers to get comfortable with the venue (Meany Hall, UW's premier performing arts space
  • We decided to video tape the event for on-demand streaming on the Research Channel website.  This added additional cost and complexity but we're hoping it will help us reach a broader audience.  The video will be spliced by speaker with light production including cuts to the audience and powerpoint presentations.  Remote speaker feeds were captured on the projection screen and will be available for viewing as well.  We plan to monitor the use statistics to determine the effectiveness of this approach.