JNUC 2014 - Feedback and planning for 2015

[cam]

Thank you to everyone who came to Minneapolis and made this JNUC a truly incredible experience. As we wrap up 2014, we'd love to hear your ideas for next year. Have a safe trip home, and we all hope to see you again soon!
cam

[John_Wetter]

Great feedback. I'll add to the WIFI part as really being the only shortcoming. I did find one spot in the theater that WIFI was always working well for me though, but I'm keeping that a secret for next year just in case! ;-) I'd agree that we could compact the between-break time down to 45 or 30 minutes to get another session in each day, but keep the long lunch. The long lunch was really great to network with people and I found it very valuable. The 1 hour between sessions... Not so much. There are lots of allotted times for networking, so break it up to 'session time' and 'networking time/food/whatever'.

I found something in all of the sessions but I wonder if a compromise between a 'call for presentations' and a 100% JAMF curated presentations as it is now might be a 'call for questions to answer at the JNUC' with a vote up/down system. Then, JAMF can curate what questions you want to answer and work with your partners/clients/others in the nation to answer those questions.

I believe strongly that mixing the EDU and Enterprise crowds is a plus. There is more in common there than we seem to think with only a few exceptions.

The screens this year did seem to be lower contrast than in the past. Maybe it's because I'm a year older but I did find several pieces of information harder to read than last year or the year before. Text just seemed a bit 'soft'. I'm waiting on the recordings for a couple things I missed because I couldn't read it quickly/accurately enough.

From the EDU side, I don't think there were enough intro classes. There are a lot of new people in the iPad space. I noticed in my presentation and in conversations with some people after that they were quite new and were feverishly trying to keep up with info I had listed in a 'matter of fact' style in my slides. It was also a note to me for the future as I'm glad I at least had those prompts for conversation during our Q & A. On that subject, keep encouraging presenters to leave ~15 minutes for Q&A, there were AWESOME questions and answers! Also, there should at least be an abbreviated or at least specified track for EDU technology integrationists. There were many of them there and I also heard that most sessions were too technical for them. They are more on the 'application of the technology' side, not the technical implementation side so finding a way to include them would be good.

For the sessions, maybe every presenter could have an 'open lab' time set aside upstairs, so you could do a "If you liked my workflow on this during the presentation, come see us in the XYZ classroom at 2pm tomorrow and you can see every detail" or something like that. At least more planful on that.

Finally, keep it at the Guthrie. Even if it sells out sooner, keep it there. There is SO MUCH to be said about not being in some conference hall somewhere...

[DLarson]

I'm a K-12 IT director and I only manage iPads, a few macs but I don't manage any macs in my JSS. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE label classes as "applies to" OSX or iOS. A simple icon near the title would do.

Lack of IPs of course was a drag.

I'd actually vote for another venue. The Guthrie is a beautiful facility but it's theaters, not classrooms. I'd much prefer a classroom setting with tables / desks over the theater arrangement with only my lap to work on. My favorite conference site was at a building on a college campus when school was out. The space was perfect for instruction as that is what it was designed for. Not being able to easily move into or out of an in progress session and no desk space for me was a problem.

I'm very technical with PCs, amateur with Mac, intermediate with iPad. What edu admins like me need is sessions where we are shown, step by step; here's how to deal with students using cellular hotspots to bypass filtering, here's how we manage what AirPrinter users on different subnets can print to, this is how to manage caching iOS updates, how to apply policies based on what network segment an iOS device is associated to or whatever issues apply to most K-12s but we don't get out of our schools much so that's what helps us, just having time to ask counterparts, what do you do about __?

Oh and I can't imagine planning this type of event so overall, yes it went very smoothly and clearly tons of planning goes into these events. Thank you!