Planning for ASHA Convention? Try the new Personal Scheduler

From experience in attending many ASHA conventions, I know that it's really important to take some time to plan your time! When you arrive at the convention center, you are likely to be overwhelmed and fall down, or cause someone to fall down, as I have in the past. To prevent unnecessary injuries, ASHA has provided us with a Personal Scheduler tool that will allow you to generate a "draft" list of sessions you might like to attend.  You can print your itinerary, save it as a PDF and, for the first time, send it to a calendar app such as iCal (the Calendar on your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch- YAY!) or Outlook (*crickets chirping*).  I can't say there isn't room for improvement with this tool (and it still lacks some of the "social" aspects I have seen in other conference schedulers, which allow you to see which of your colleagues are going to which sessions), but these exporting features are a nice leap forward.  Check out the short video below to see how it works, and happy planning!



I also made a quick guide to how to send your itinerary to your iDevice after emailing it as shown in the video.  Again, this process isn't perfect- I found that there was a glitch with session titles if you add two in the same time slot (you may see the title of one selection repeated, though the session descriptions are accurate). Additionally, if you are in a different time zone than the convention, you may want to wait to actually add the itinerary to the calendar until you arrive, or just be willing to do the math as you review the sessions beforehand.  Also note, once you export your itinerary, it will not sync with the Personal Scheduler, i.e. any new sessions you add on the web will NOT be in your calendar.  So, you'll want to wait until you have given everything a thorough look before you export. See below for this guide:


ASHA Personal Scheduler to iDevice

If all that sounds too complicated, you can just print away or send yourself the PDF to access on your mobile device! Have fun!