Skritter has attended the ACTFL three times, and every time I organize it, I forget how busy it is to do the conference right before Thanksgiving! Jake and I were in attendance in Philadelphia last week, and I had every intention of wrapping up conference followups and getting a blog post out before T-day, but it just wasn’t possible. To those folks who signed up for the raffle at our booth, we will be getting the results out by next week, so stay tuned for word from us regarding who won free access to Skritter for one year!
In sum, the conference was a blast. I met with some promising young entrepreneurs, our friends from ChinesePod, competitors, textbook publishers, and a slew of teachers from across the world. Although next year there will certainly be things we can improve about our booth setup and presentation methods (note: don’t bring more than one iPad), we were happy with the overall results of attending.
Probably the coolest part of attending the conference this year was meeting all the new companies in the space. Our booth was adjacent to FluentU (formerly Fluent Flix), one aisle over from DiLL, and we got to meet Yangyang from Yoyo Chinese as well as the folks from LingT. I really can’t speak too highly of the folks from all of these companies.
Alan and his crew from FluentU were great to meet, and it has given me a new respect for their product to meet the smart and driven people behind it. If you haven’t checked out their site, I highly recommend doing so. In addition to being a very compelling idea, it’s beautifully implemented. If you like video and you want to learn Chinese, I can’t think of a good reason not to try them out.
Yangyang from Yoyo Chinese was a truly inspirational entrepreneur and someone I would trust with my language instruction. Apart from just being an all-around nice person (she actually brought us some lunch just in case we couldn’t get away from our booth!), she had an impressive understanding of what it takes to be a successful tutor and instructor.
Finally, if you haven’t checked out DiLL for your language learning lab, I highly suggest you do. Although I will readily admit that I know a lot less about language labs than I do about consumer-oriented language learning products, their team was highly impressive and they deserve a serious look by anyone looking to upgrade an existing language lab or building one from scratch.
So, thanks for everyone at the ACTFL for making it a success in 2012. Happy holidays from everyone at Skritter!