Last year we attended the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) conference in Orlando Florida. It was a harrowing experience. We learned of the conference approximately 2 weeks before it occurred. One of our teachers told us that she was going and it would be a good venue at which to show Skritter. We did a little research and realized that not only did the ACTFL sound like a great opportunity for us, the Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA) also holds their annual meeting jointly. Double win!
We drove all the way from Cleveland to Orlando in one go, all three of us crammed into Scott’s tiny little Toyota Matrix. It was magical, and rather smelly. But we made it. We met John Pasden, he blogged about us, and the rest is history.
This year, we are returning to the conference, which is being held in San Diego this time around. Scott opted to man the base while Nick and I attend. So bright and early tomorrow morning Nick and I leave on a highly upgraded mode of transit: a plane! (For the record, we did briefly consider driving, but it was ruled impractical, despite the fact that it had serious roadtrip potential.) Our plane is set to arrive tomorrow afternoon Pacific time. After landing we will setup the booth and await the beginning of the conference on Friday morning.
We suspect that conference attendance will be down this year due to economic woes, but we have high hopes that it will be just as great as last year, even though there isn’t another John Pasden to meet. We’ll do at least one blog from the conference to keep everyone up to date.
Apart from it being a great a place to show off Skritter, Nick and I were pleased to note how nice San Diego looks relative to Cleveland this time of year. To illustrate the difference, I did a quick (but highly scientific) study. I typed “Cleveland Conference Center” into Google, chose the first result on the map, and took a screen capture of whatever Google Street View gave me (I didn’t adjust the view to focus on the actual convention center, which obviously increases the academic rigor of the results). Here’s the result:
I did the same thing for the San Diego Convention Center and here’s what I saw:
San Diego here we come!