We have returned from our respective homelands and are working again. Nick and I spent the day leading up to Thanksgiving attending the ACTFL convention out in sunny San Diego, CA.
We flew out on Thursday the 18th, all of our connections were on time and the only hitch turned out to be getting the rental car from Budget. Luckily we managed to overcome that problem and we made out with a righteous Suzuki Reno. We set up our booth on the afternoon of the 18th and started conferencing the next day. From Friday to Sunday we talked to more than 150 educators, language lab superstars, and administrators from schools all over the nation. We got many opportunities to brag about Skritter, and about as many opportunities to hear what needs Skritter didn’t address. We managed to secure a good spot right across from the Hanban pavilion, and we enjoyed great traffic.
Later today I’ll post the pictures of our booth, but in the mean time I wanted to plug our neighbors. We were right next to aha!Chinese and we were really impressed with the founders, Karen Wu and Janet Lin. They make an educational series of textbooks and interactive software for young learners of Chinese. Skritter isn’t terribly easy for children to use, but aha!Chinese is, so if you are looking for materials to help a young person learn the language, we definitely recommend taking a look at what they have created. We will be adding them to our links page in the next few days. I first have to dig out of my email backlog!