Scratch Poster at ISTE 2011

It has been a long time since I have given a poster presentation, and I have never given one at ISTE before. I wasn't really sure what to expect, especially first thing  - 8 AM - on the first full day of the conference. What I really didn't expect was to be ambushed at 7:45 and not get a chance to even eat breakfast until it was over! I really enjoyed this format. I was able to give a quick 10 minute spiel, and then answer questions or discuss how they could use Scratch in their classrooms.
I had two goals when I created my poster:

1. Use text sparingly
2. Use QR Codes instead of handouts

I'm really proud of how my poster looks. As a former Graphic Art teacher, I love having the opportunity to play with Adobe InDesign. I tried to play off the colors in the program itself and use the same font as Scratch.

I thought QR Codes would be a great idea, and I had several on my poster. I linked to the following web pages:
http://scratch.mit.edu/
http://scratched.media.mit.edu/

This worked for about 60% of the people that stopped by. Either they didn't have a device to read QR codes, didn't know what they were or both. I had about 100 business cards that were gone in like 10 minutes. My goal at ISTE is to come home with the least amount of paper as possible - but that didn't seem to be the standard operating procedure.


All in all I had a great experience presenting a poster at ISTE, and I highly recommend presenting one!