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NECC 2008

Anne Wujcik —Thursday, July 03, 2008

By now, almost everyone has arrived back home from the 29th Annual National Educational Computing Conference, held this year in San Antonio, TX. .ISTE announced that more than 17,600 people attended, including 12,654 registered attendees and 5,037 exhibit personnel. That’s down slightly from last year’s total of 13, 353 registrants, though more exhibit personnel attended this year. Most of the exhibitors I spoke with were happy with the traffic in the Exhibit Hall, and educators seemed to be both energetic and focused in terms of the kind of information they were seeking.

Overall, I found the Exhibit Hall a bit overwhelming. Fitting the reputation of the host state, the Exhibit Hall was huge. ISTE says that it spanned five and one half football fields, featuring 1,340 booths and 479 companies displaying hardware, software, educational and technical publishing, and equipment/services. That’s about 100 more booths and nearly the same number of exhibitors as were present in Atlanta last year; the differing impact may have been the result of the presence of a number of very large individual exhibit spaces this year. The interactive whiteboard companies continued to attract large numbers of attendees to their various presentations this year. Teachers were showing interest in the various ultra mobile PCs on exhibit, asking questions about specs and capabilities and trying to get a feel for their touch pads and keyboards. Many booths featured enterprise products or one flavor or another and learning management systems seem to be the emerging category.

I don’t remember getting quite so many press release and product announcements from previous NECCs, but my memory’s not what it used to be. Whatever the case, there are a lot of announcements and I tried to get as many as possible in this week. I know I’ve missed some and that others will continue to trickle in, so I expect to wrap up NECC news in next week’s issue. For this week, if a company made a number of announcements, I picked the one that seemed most newsworthy (very subjective, I know) to include in the B2E e-mail and put the rest on the web site. This may be a week you will want to go to the web site and just browse the PreK-12 and Technology sections to be sure to see everything that’s posted. If you’re looking for something specific, use the search box to enter the company or product name and see what’s available.

All of us at QED and the Heller Reports wish you a Happy Fourth of July.