Anyone Know of an Online Tool for Teachers to Select Workshops for Conference/PD Day?

Hi All,
Hope it is OK to use this group as a "brains trust". I am not so well connected on Twitter to be able to get answers like I see some do!

I am busily organising a conference (a first in Hong Kong) for international school teachers. I am using eventbrite, a great online tool for conference registration but my next major task is allowing teachers to assign themselves to workshops once I have the programme up. (Yes we spell it that way in Hong Kong too :-)

I am wondering if anyone out there has run a confernce or PD day and allowed for staff to self-register for workshops from a list on during a time period. It would be great if the tool also allowed the teacher to see if a workshop was already quite full. Maybe I could assign a max number and they could see say 20/25 for the workshop.

As I am already losing a bit on the other online tools (Eventbrite and Paypal), it would be good if it was free or very minimal cost. (Yes! I want it all for nothing! Typical of an opportunist Aussie Teacher :-)

Thanks in advance.

Paul

Tags: online, timetabling, tool, workshops

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Permalink Reply by Steve Hargadon on April 9, 2008 at 11:14am

I use Wikispaces for this. It does require learning how to edit a wiki... But it does do the trick.

See http://www.classroom20wiki.com/Attending+Phoenix+2008 for an example.

Steve

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Permalink Reply by James Dykstra on April 9, 2008 at 11:32am

We are doing the registration for our regional Heritage Fair using Zoho Creator (creator.zoho.com). Our form (embedded here: http://www.redriverheritage.ca/registrationonline.html) gets the users to fill in all the information we choose and then puts it into a spreadsheet for us. Creator has database functions that I haven't attempted to use, but they would likely allow you to do the fancier parts of your registration process, including setting limits for certain workshops. Everything on Zoho is available for free. Though we've only given it a limited trial (so far about 50 students are registered), I'm quite pleased with the results so far.

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Permalink Reply by Steve Hargadon on April 9, 2008 at 12:21pm

Wow. That's a great call. I've got to look into that!

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Permalink Reply by Paul McMahon on April 9, 2008 at 8:24pm

Fantastic!
Thanks Steve and James. I will look into these options. I think Jame's option will work better as some of the teachers attending will not be comfortable with editing a wiki.

Regards

Paul