A) In-Service Workshop
B) I got the SWag
C) Information Served Wirelessly
If you ever have a chance to hear KMEA Historian Bryan Kirk talk about the early days of our In-Service Workshop, I encourage you to do so. At one of the KMEA board meetings this past year Bryan gave a presentation about some of KMEA's important moments. In roughly 30 minutes he barely scratched the surface of our organization's timeline, but from those few moments we were able to take away many memories. One that certainly hit home for me was when he passed around one of the earliest issues of the Kansas Music Review... or to put it succinctly, several pieces of mimeograph held together with a paper clip. How far we have come!
Ron Chronister was KMEA President when I joined the staff. I remember well our initial training meeting—he kept driving home the point that Kansas is a leader among MEAs. And who was I to argue with my state president? But the lesson was driven home many years later. In June 2012, KMR Editor Cathy Hunt and I presented at the NAfME state editors meeting. There were about 24 states represented in the room, along with some of the NAfME staff. We gave an extensive overview of how KMEA developed the online Kansas Music Review. Since starting this process, we've found that many other state MEAs simply take the print version of their magazine and post a PDF online. Cathy had surveyed MEAs and found this to be the case for a significant number of states.
KMEA strives to have the best possible publication, but we know there is much work yet to do. We continue to make small improvements with each issue. This is now our seventh issue of the online KMR. Starting with the first online issue (Fall 2011), no two issues had the same code running in the background. Something has been tweaked each time. In the meantime the KMR has already become a national model for MEAs wanting to transform their publications from print to online. Ron's lesson comes to mind.
Now back to the story: Bryan Kirk's presentation of KMEA's history included a brief overview of the early development of the In-Service Workshop, including the years prior to Century II Convention Center being completed in 1969. Just as the code that runs the KMR is constantly changing, the ISW is never the same from year to year.
With the advent of mobile web technology, we are now able to deliver KMEA and ISW information directly to your smartphone via our mobile website (m.ksmea.org). The mobile site is embedded to the right of this paragraph. Information available includes:
- KMEA Contact Info
- President's Message
- Presidents of KMEA
- KMEA Hall of Fame
- All-State Groups (ticket info, concerts, clinicians, rosters)
- ISW info (schedule, exhibits, performance repertoire, clinician bios, registration hours, floor plans)
If you have 3G or 4G service on your phone, you can access our mobile site while at ISW. Also, there has been an open wi-fi signal in the Century II Connecting Lobby the past couple of years, so you can avoid using your data plan by connecting there.
You can darken your screen by scrolling to the bottom of any screen in the mobile site and touching the Theater Mode link. That will invert your screen to a black background, thus helping you avoid annoying those around you while yet conserving your battery. Win-win!
And last but not least... please silence your phones in concerts and clinics, unless you happen to be this guy: