At Last, The Conference

Children's Art Decorates the Hallways

The official part of the conference for us usually begins on Wednesday evening with the opening display of exhibits and a reception, followed by dinner with a group of friends that we meet up with at this session.  This year's conference is a little different because the exhibits are not going to be open until Thursday evening.  The AOSA scheduled two group sessions on Wednesday evening that were designed to get folks together and do some mixers and group activities.  Jim Solomon led a Drum Jam and the Amidon's lead some group singing and dancing to close the evening.

We had our usual dinner with friends and attended the late session.  This of course was after our tour of Grand Coulee so we suffered a bit of travel fatigue.  I like the Wednesday group sessions idea and in my observations, they were very well attended.

Thursday included sessions all day which for me, starting with learning about the Promethean whiteboard system, moving on to interesting and creative ways to adapt modal pieces from the Orff volumes, and two sessions with the improvisation master, Paul Winter.

The whiteboard session was interesting because of the prevalence of these learning tools in classrooms around the country.  Beatin' Path Publications has released several books including ready-made visuals specifically for whiteboards.  According to feedback in the session this is a great idea and folks appreciate having ready made flip charts that they can feed directly into the white board software.

Paul Winter's sessions were worth the price of admission, definitely the highlight of the conference for me.  The three hour session took us from the very beginnings of improvisation to a full-fledged group improvisation session at the end, with the final experience a vocal improv based on the drone and the major scale.  Amazing!

Paul Winter and his Consort will be doing the Friday evening concert.

More Pictures of the Conference can by found at my Mobile Me Conference Gallery.