Podcast Share – UEN Homeroom UCET23 Reflection

I attended my first UCET in 2018. I had just come back from SXSWEDU week and I was on fire for more ideas and community. At the suggestion of my good friend, Quin Henderson, I headed to the University of Utah and joined the conference. I was excited to talk to a lot of the speakers as part of our podcast project at the time, Edtrex Rewind, and to just take in the conference. It was the first time that I had attended a state-level education conference and I was tickled by how much fun I had throughout the event. Over the next few years, I presented at UCET and engaged with the larger community through #UTedchat on Wednesday nights.

In 2020, I applied to be on the board. I didn’t think I would make it. There had to be more qualified educators and community members that were available to help out with the conference, but to my deep surprise, while in a meeting to figure out the best way to approach the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic, I found out that I was on the board. Now, just a few years later, I was lucky enough to be elected president and to run the conference. This year’s conference was the culmination of a lot of goals for myself and for the board. We wanted to have a larger community represented at the conference. We wanted national figures at the conference to interact with Utah educators. With the inclusion of ULEAD, the Utah Teacher Fellows, the Friends of the Salt Lake City Public Library, the STEM Action Center, Show Up for Teachers, USBE, and UEN we brought a larger swath of Utah organizations to share their work with the conference, but we also were able to bring in national figures and organizations including Eric Curts, Sundance, Dan Ryder, Micah Shippee, Dee Lanier, Darren Hudgins, The Modern Classrooms Project, and more to the conference. In conjunction with that, we were able to move forward with moving to a larger venue for the 2024 conference and to make the president a two-year position, which means I get another shot next year.

Dani and I were able to sit down with some great field recordings from the conference and discuss the conference and UCET’s impact on both of us, Dani as a past president and me as the current president. We hit a lot of the great moments from the conference, both in 2023 and from prior years. Listen in to be introduced to the best education conference in Utah and prime yourself for 2024! Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

https://uen-homeroom.simplecast.com/episodes/post-ucet-teacher-review-UctQ3gAc