I had the good fortune to be invited to attend Microsoft's inaugural Innovative Teachers Conference this past week. As always, the highlights for me were the people and the conversations we had in the hallways and over good food.

By far, the best part was meeting face to face for the first time with Kathy Cassidy and Ben Hazzard. When you mix in Clarence Fisher, Chris Harbeck, John Evans, Joan Badger with an open Ustream feed to bring in Dean Shareski, Alec Couros, and a wider network of passionate educators via twitter you get some of the best professional development around. Unfortunately we didn't record it. However, about 100 seconds were captured by Rodd Lucier, thanks for that Rodd!

Lesson Learned: Always record in Ustream. And if you're watching and wondering if you should screencast, the answer is: yes!

The conference opened with a keynote presentation by Arnold Wasserman from The Idea Factory. His presentation was titled The Culture of Innovation. It was filled with thought provoking ideas but I strongly disagree with his essential message in this first presentation of two: It is impossible to innovate your professional practice unless the organization within which you work is an innovative organization.

Here is the podcast recording of that presentation. Give it a listen. I'd love to hear what you think after you hear Arnold speak.

I captured three other podcasts during the conference which I will share here over the next few days: Arnold Wasserman (part 2), Richard Van Eck (on educational gaming; he was the highlight presenter of the conference for me), and Les Foltos' closing session that had several of us brianstorming around the idea of what the ideal innovative classroom would look like: physically, pedagogically, and with an eye towards teachers professional development.