With more than 8,500 registered attendees from all over the nation, this year's TCEA conference was the largest ever, said TCEA Executive Director Ron Cravey.

"Everyone there had a good time, and the amount of knowledge shared was overwhelming." Cravey said. "One attendee described this year's event as 'awesome' and told me he 'would be here every year' until he died. TCEA will continue to grow bigger and better, and I am proud to be a part of it."

Those in attendance had a chance to tour an exhibit hall featuring 430 ed-tech vendors and sit in on any of the dozens of workshops and concurrent sessions. (For session reviews written by conference attendees, see here.)

They also heard keynote speeches from former NASA astronaut Sally Ride, who sounded an alarm about the state of science education in the nation's schools, and New York Times technology columnist David Pogue, who described new technologies that "will change your life" and discussed their implications for today's educators.

Another feature unique to this year's conference: eSchool News hosted a two-day "Ed-Tech Best Practices Summit," during which conference attendees learned how their colleagues in other schools are using technology successfully to enhance education. Among the approaches that were highlighted were solutions from American Education Corp., Atomic Learning, BenQ, ePals, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, LenSec, Lightspeed Systems, Moodlerooms, PBS TeacherLine, Saywire, Troxell Communications, and Voyager Expanded Learning.

Why science matters

"It is suicidal to create a society dependent on science and technology in which hardly anybody knows anything about science and technology," the astronomer Carl Sagan once said--and former NASA astronaut Sally Ride couldn't agree more: At the 2008 TCEA conference, Ride used this quote to highlight the importance of science education.

"Nationally, we just don't put enough emphasis" on science literacy, she said in a Feb. 6 keynote speech. "It's time for us to wake up and respond to this challenge, just as we did 50 years ago in response to Sputnik."

Colleges in the United States aren't graduating enough scientists and engineers, Ride said, and this threatens the nation's ability to compete in a global economy.

But it's not just our future scientists and engineers who need to learn more about science, she added: Because science plays an increasingly important role in our society, students will have to make many decisions--such as what kind of foods to eat, or what kind of products to buy--that depend on scientific literacy.