Monday morning notes

~ scottkober ~ Leave a comment

A few quick hitters to start your week:

  • If you haven’t already set the time aside, you really should plan to watch our CMEpalooza Company Spotlight this Wednesday (April 12) at noon ET, where I’ll be joined by a team from Global Academy for Medical Education. I always think it’s interesting to hear how different organizations focus their CME missions differently and approach challenges/opportunities creatively. It’s only 30 minutes, and I can promise you’ll take something away from it.You can watch on the Spotlight on our LIVE page. There will be the usual opportunity to ask questions and offer comments if you’d like. Or you can just lurk silently.
  • Thanks to everyone who played CMEpalooza Pursuit. We had a record number of entries for one of our Sponsor events and crashed a number of our Sponsor websites with the thousands of visitors to their pages who were digging for correct answers. We even had one brown-noser who went above and beyond and completed the full question board. Alas, she was not a prize winner.Here is a list of our winners:
    • Grand Prize ($100 Amazon gift card) – Amanda Kaczerski
    • $50 Amazon gift cards – Audrie Tornow, Gabriella Cruze, Don Harting, Kristi English, Elizabeth McDonald
    • $25 Amazon gift cards – Edeline Mitton, Danielle DeFour, Bonnie Bixler, Andrea Thrasher, Joanne Wise, Karin Pearson
  • We’re a little more than a week away from our Spring extravaganza. If you haven’t already called out sick so that you can watch every session from your couch in your jammies, probably a good idea to start working on your cough soon.

Last Chance to Play CMEpalooza Pursuit – Entries Due Today

~ scottkober ~ Leave a comment

Today is the deadline for entries into CMEpalooza Pursuit – forms must be sent to me before midnight ET. Don’t forget that we’re giving away $500 in Amazon gift cards and really only asking for 5-10 minutes of your time. You never know, you might learn something along the way too.

Here is a reminder of how to play:

Here are the rules of CMEpalooza Pursuit:

1. Call up the Sponsor page on the CMEpalooza website. You’ll need this for reference purposes to access our Sponsors’ websites.

2. Download the CMEpalooza Pursuit question form by clicking on this link.

You’ll see that questions are divided into categories that will be familiar to anyone who has ever played Trivial Pursuit – Geography, Entertainment, History, Arts & Literature, Science & Nature, and Sports & Leisure. There are three questions within each category, the answers to which can all be found on the sponsoring company website.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to answer every question – just one per category. If you want to be the teacher’s pet, of course, you can answer every question, though you get no formal extra credit, just that all over warm feeling for a job well done.

3. Download the CMEpalooza Pursuit answer form by clicking on this link. This is where you will enter in your answers – remember, only one answer is required per category. I promise that none of the questions are tricky or difficult. If it takes you more than 10 minutes to complete the entire challenge, you are doing something wrong.

4. Email me your completed answer form. It’s scott@medcasewriter.com. All completed forms will be entered into our drawing. One entry per person. Perhaps you make this a company-wide challenge and have your entire team enter individually. Perhaps you keep this a secret so that your chances of winning improve. Whatever. Just make sure that your entry is submitted by the deadline of midnight ET on Thursday, April 6.

You Could Be Doing This, Too

~ Thecmeguy ~ Leave a comment

This is the blog post where I remind all of you that you could be doing this, too. Not literally sitting in a coffee shop at 21st and Walnut Sts. in Philadelphia typing a blog post while you wait for your 10-year-old daughter to finish orchestra practice (she plays the violin. I am easily the least talented person in this family…), but you could be using the same tools that Scott and I use to run CMEpalooza. This is what we use:

  • WordPress for our website/blog
  • YouTube Live (née Google Hangouts) to stream presentations
  • WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for promotion

That’s basically it. Yes, there’s a little bit of a learning curve for using these things, but less than you might think. Every year the technology gets better, the video quality improves, and it gets easier for people to use. We have far fewer tech issues now than when we first started doing CMEpalooza (OK, yes, the first session of CMEpalooza Fall 2016 went completely offline for a few minutes, but that was because my stupid laptop crapped out, which was my own dumb fault) and the majority of our faculty are able to come right onto their session Hangouts with little difficulty. The technology works. It’s not perfect, but it works pretty dang well.

Now here’s the kicker. Do you know how much it costs for us to produce CMEpalooza? Any guesses?

$25.

I pay 25 bucks for the CMEpalooza.com URL (which I pay all on my own. Do I ask Scott to chip in? I do not, because that’s the kind of guy I am. I’m a giver.) That’s it. Everything else is free. I’m not including the hours Scott and I put into it, but the website cost is the only monetary expense involved. This is definitely something you can afford to try.

In closing, let me remind you of a couple of upcoming CMEpalooza-related activities.