I had to make my HAT the first of these "month of InstructureCon" posts... because the hat was how most of my random InstCon conversations would start! "Hey, cool hat," somebody would say, or they would ask me if it was swag and where they could get theirs. That was all I needed to launch into my spiel about how I was the Panda-Drone from the Canvas Community, and how people had picked sessions for me to attend, etc. etc. Perfect way to launch a discussion about Community with literally every person I met at InstructureCon. I even talked about it with people who weren't part of the conference, like our nice shuttle drivers, the catering guys (some of the catering guys had impressive hats too!), people in my condo building, etc.
I wore the hat everywhere, all the time, which meant I was always getting questions, along with looks from people who seemed like they wanted to say something... even if they didn't come right out with it, ha ha. Wearing a T-shirt with a message is another good way to get conversations started, but the hat worked even better than a T-shirt because it was, well, weirder. And it really does help to have a conversation starter. Once a conversation gets going, I'm pretty much unstoppable... but getting a conversation started is not easy for me. The hat took care of that! It also was useful for people who were looking for me; they might not know my face, but they could look for the person in the drone hat. I tried to sit in the front row of every session I attended; here I am sitting next to @bstachowiak at @lindalee 's presentation (this was the first time I met Bonni in person... and I had just met Linda for the first time the night before!). The hat does help to stand out in a crowd (and InstCon was seriously crowded; more on that in a future post).
So, THANK YOU to awilliams for coming up with the idea of the Panda-Drone . I really liked having people find sessions for me to attend (I'll have more to say about that later)... and then the hat itself also proved to be a big part of my InstructureCon experience. If you too want a hat like this, just search Amazon for "propeller beanie" -- so many options (the banner image above is a "customers who bought this also bought..." screenshot from Amazon). I packed the hat very carefully both coming to Keystone and going home so that the propeller didn't get crushed. If I ever get to go to InstructureCon again, the hat will come with me!
Here's a tweet from Tuesday morning where I managed to take a video selfie with the propeller spinning... ready for InstructureCon lift-off! 🙂
There were other people with excellent hats also; the awesome ladies from Broward County had hats! I will be writing up a blog post later about their presentation:
@Renee_Carney and erinhallmark also had hats... maybe they have a picture they can share here? Oh, @scottdennis had a great hat also that he wore during the Community presentation. And snufer had some fabulous hats that were prizes at his presentation. Is there a picture of someone wearing that beautiful jester hat? I haven't checked out the Instagram stream at all yet; I bet there are hats there too! So, share your hat pix here, people! As I find more, I'll come back around to this post and include them. 🙂
Meanwhile, there will be more posts with this tag here at the Community; click anytime to see where I am so far:
Blog on, everybody!
