SMART Exemplary Educators Summit Tiger

The past few years I've had the honor and the pleasure to attend three different SMART Exemplary Educator Summits and if you count the precursor The International SMART Board forum along, than I've attended in total four professional development training camps organized by SMART Technologies in a foreign country.

My first official summit was in the summer of 2011 at the headquarters in Calgary, Alberta (Canada) and I was invited to come over and have a look at how the North-Americans did run a show like that, because together with 5 other SEEs from Europe we were going to be the peer mentors at the EMEA SEE Summit in Hamburg (or Paris) the next year. At this summit there were also about 50 SEEs from Canada and the US. This Summit was (perhaps due to the fact that it was way out of my time zone in the beautiful country of Canada) epic to me. I've learned so much and gained so many friends. My love for SMART gained a boost and was ready to adopt more technology in my classroom. This was also the start of my first global collaboration project with teachers from abroad.

Class of 2011

My second summit that I attended was in Hamburg at the local SMART office during the summer of 2012. There we're about 30 SEEs from EMEA and four from North-America (3 from the US and one from Canada) to learn from and share with each other. This Summit took only three days of professional development and I did two presentations. New friends were made and old friends were reunited again. New global collaboration projects started from here.

Class of 2012

My third summit was in Calgary, Alberta (Canada) again. The summit was a global one, therefore there were about 76 SEEs present. SEEs from Canada, the US, EMEA and Panama, Chile and Mexico. This was the one that was most epic. Different from the other ones, and I've made even more new friends and was (at last?) reunited with old friends as well. Whilst putting this words down, I'm still suffering from summit withdrawals. I'm missing my fellow SEEs and want to work even more with them. Global collaboration will be taken to a next level ...

Class of 2014

Besides the locations, amount of SEEs that attended and the latest software releases at the moment of the summits, there were some differences between them. I'll try to share my opinion on that. 

At first in my opinion we did less sharing at the latest summit, compared to the other two that I attended. All SEEs needed to prepare and bring their best lesson to the 2011 and 2012 summit and needed to show and share in smaller groups. That is definitely something I've missed during the global summit. The amount of technical details was merely the same, although was the focus on this summit of course on amp and less on Notebook. New were the hackathons and the sessions we did with the developers. That is a great benefit from the other summits I've attended. We could share our feature requests etc. directly with the developers and could actually see that a lot things were put right into action. We all loved that! Watch out for the new releases of amp and Notebook! This was also the first year that the Global SEE platform was a great part of it, which made people do and share things on that platform. As I already stated before ... after the last summit I'm suffering more from summit withdrawals, so I guess it's addictive and I need to be with my fellow SEEs more and more again. There!

EMEA and Global Summit compared