People trying to enter crowded room at TLT Symposium
Some sessions last year drew standing-room only crowds

Hi everyone and Happy Valentine’s Day!

The Symposium is just a bit over four weeks away, and this week we want to tell you about the Symposium schedule that is now on the event site, a few new things about this year, and a reminder about our Yammer public page.

First, the 2013 full schedule is now on the Symposium website! As in the past two years, we offer an online scheduling application to customize their schedule for the day and to view it on any number of mobile devices. To access the schedule:

  1. Visit the Symposium site at http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/ and from the top menu select Schedule.
  2. To view details on any session, move your cursor over the title. To customize your schedule according to the sessions you wish to attend, you need to log in with a sched.org account. To create a sched.org account, select the Sign up link in the upper right.
  3. Once you are logged on, you can select the star next to each session you plan to attend. The star will turn from white to black.
  4. If you also wish to add a social networking flavor to your schedule, you can establish a connection between your Twitter, Facebook and your sched.org account. This will allow you to see which sessions your connections have chosen. To do so, click the Facebook and/or Twitter icon. You will need to log in to the social network you have chosen and allow it access to sched.org. Refresh your browser. When you select the People link, your connections will be listed under My Friends.
  5. You can see who else is interested in each of the sessions by clicking on the session title, which will send you to that session’s page.

Now, onto a few things that are new this year. This year, we will have a “Hands-on Room” where you can go and actually try out some of the interesting ed tech applications that are discussed in some of the sessions. We will detail more about this in a future email/Yammer post.

While we will have publisher sessions throughout the day focusing on textbooks, this year we will have a session that gives students’ perspectives on textbooks. This session will be at 2:45 p.m. in Room 206.

We are also happy to announce a breakfast “upgrade.” As a little something extra for our attendees, we will offer a full breakfast buffet this year. So be sure you don’t eat anything before you arrive, as the Penn Stater always does a fantastic breakfast!

And finally, want to remind you that we have a Yammer public group where you can discuss the event and ask us questions. Please join at https://www.yammer.com/psu.edu/#/threads/inGroup?type=in_group&feedId=1034509.

That’s all until next week. In the next several weeks, we’ll talk about our exciting panel sessions (including one on MOOCs), how to plan your day, Symposium social media, how you can participate in the day, and more.