NextGenTeachers

Despite it being my half-term, I’ve just got back from a two-day conference. It was pretty much the only way I could go: the combined cost of the conference, hotel and rail fare meant that my school wouldn’t have also been able to shell out for supply cover. I had a great time - here’s what I got up to…

Day 1

Session 1: Dan Sutch - Innovations

Dan, one of the learning researchers at Futurelab, spoke on innovation. He discussed how both the top-down and end-user approaches don’t really cut it and how they need to be used together. Although various definitions of ‘innovation’ were flying around, he thought of it as:

The successful exploitation of ideas generated at the intersection of invention and insight, which leads to the creation of social or economic value.

He talked of the contexts for innovation and that instead of being put into groups we need to be forming interest and skills-based networks. I was pleased that he mentioned NextGenTeachers as an example of this.

My notes on this session can be found via Google Docs here.

Session 2: Donald Clark - NEW theories and OLD practice

I was warned before Donald’s presentation that he was a ‘love him or hate him’-type figure. I’ve just discovered his blog here. He has a very engaging presentational style which unfortunately I can’t reproduce here. He did provoke some discussion, especially around the kind of inevitability of using ideas and tools without the pedagogy to back them up. He attacked VAK learning styles, the graph which shows that you remember 10% of what you’re told, etc. and talked of classrooms being like ‘boxes’ in which we put students.

My notes on this session can be found via Google Docs here.

Workshop Session: John Morgan - Enquiring Minds: enquiring schools?

John discussed the Enquiring Minds project he has been involved with in his role with Futurelab. Details of the (ongoing) project can be found here. I found this session to be very poorly presented and executed, unfortunately and I lost concentration. It reminded me of being back in the classroom as a pupil 10 years ago during a lesson by a bad teacher, unfortunately. I didn’t make any notes that couldn’t be found on the Futurelab website.

Session 3: Trevor Baylis - Why Invent?

Trevor used this session to promote his ideas about Intellectual Property and tell the story of his life as an inventor. My notes can be found here - bereft, of course, of his wit and personality.

Evening

Instead of going to the evening dinner and entertainment I met up with Dan Lyndon, commenter on this blog, Advanced Skills Teacher and webmaster of both comptonhistory.com and blackhistory4schools.com. He’s a great guy, an inspirational teacher and it was good to catch up with him.

Day 2

Session 1: Lizbeth Goodman - Inventive play: technology-enhanced learning and gaming tools that enable community engagement and communication

Lizbeth is from SMARTlab, the Digital Media Institute at the University of East London. SMARTlab work with physically and cognitively disabled people, as well as abused women, etc. - those who can be on the margins of the society. They aim to allow them to express themselves through dance, use of technology, and such.

She gave an engaging (although occasionally scatty) multimedia-rich presentation to which my notes can’t really do justice…

Session 2: Dan Sutch - Summary and overview of workshop sessions

Dan gave some feedback from text messages and comments made during the conference so far and asked questions, encouraging us to reflect in time for Tim Rudd’s session in the afternoon. Brief notes here.

Workshop Session: Mark Pearce - Alternative futures - a practical guide to using visual scenario planning techniques in education

By far the best session of the conference, a hands-on approach to planning for the future given its unknowability and uncertainty. We were given the task of pitching on behalf of a specific company to control education in London in 2015: my group were Innocent, another was Virgin, and the final one Google. We had to take into account our company’s interests and priorities when coming up with what education would look like and when presenting. To assist us, theWorkshop have developed something called the Scenario Visualization Tool which can help flesh-out and demonstrate what you are thinking.

At the end of the session we reflected whether the insights we had gained had helped our practice and worldview. Guess what? It had. What a great session! My notes are here, not that they’ll be much good due to the hands-on nature of the session.

Session 3: Tim Rudd - All change for innovation

Tim’s was a manifesto session - an open-floor question and answer and discussion time to try and think about how to deal with barriers and resistances to innovation. The questions which drove this were:

• What are we trying to achieve/bring about through innovation
• Are we doing innovation for innovation’s sake?
• How to we convince others - institutional logic - existing cultures - folk pedagogies?
• Do we need a wider debate on the purpose of education?

No notes from this session as I was involved in the debate!

Thoughts and take-aways

I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to be surrounded by people from different areas of education who are nevertheless working towards the same thing. I met people from industry, from Becta, from universities, from charities, from schools, from all over the world. I made real-world connections with people I’d never have had the chance to make otherwise (I must make sure I follow those up). I also met some people like Leon Cych that I’ve only ever met virtually.

One last point: I’ve never seen so many people using Macbooks in one place. And if they weren’t using Macs they were using super-slim Sony VAIOs. And if they weren’t using either of those, they were using tablets. It just goes to show that those in the know appreciate both form and function. I’m not being flippant here - I really do think the interface with educational technology is very important and something for institutions to consider.

(Futurelab has a blog called FLUX for their latest thoughts/ideas)

A lot to say, but not a lot of time to type. This one’s a low quality car-cast done on my way home this afternoon.

Show Notes:

• Art Club restarts soon!
• Powering Up With Technology Conference! I MIGHT be a presenter
• PETE & C! Same here!
• MICCA! I have no idea, but I hope so here, too!
• More web sites to be announced later!

Yeah, I’ve been busy.

I have just sat down to breath and eat lunch at 2:45 this afternoon. It has been another hectic day at the e-Learning chalk face here in Qatar. I am being challenged and extended in many different and exciting directions, each of which is taking my time and energy.

The day started with a 7am meeting with the e-Education Project Manager from ICT Qatar. What an interesting meeting! ICT Qatar was decreed by the Emir in 2004 as an organisation to promote and support e-Learning throughout Qatar. Their initiatives include the e-schoolbag and a pilot program is being run at an independent school in Al-Wakra (a gas mining town about 40 minutes drive north fo Doha). We exchanged ideas and discussed plans for possible joint exchanges in the future. I was so impressed with the Project Manager. She was an articulate and educated Arabic woman and had lived in different countries including UK and Singapore and really seemed to know what she was talking about. I am looking forward to receiveing the research material she promised me that is showing huge increases in educational outcomes from the Table PC implementation.

After teaching two classes I then drove in my friends large blue Jaguar car to the next meeting, on the Education City campus, but what the heck, it is still warm outside and any excuse to ride in the Jag! This meeting was with the Qatar Foundation Director for Information Technology, the Assistant IT Director and also representatives from EDS, the outsourced IT Support company now on campus. Our agenda was to discuss the needs and requirements for supporting learning at QA with IT infrastructure and service. What is your vision for learning with IT. I was asked? How can we support this vision? What do you need? Let's work together and find the funds and do what is needed....OK, sounds good..... There is another blog post in there for another day!

So, after the meeting back in the Jag (no lunch!) and straight to my Grade 10 Flat Classroom Project class. We are working through wiki editing issues, communication issues and of course they are all trying to decide what their topic will be for the personal video. Some of the conversations I had with my students during this class really made me realise how easy it is to bring the world into the classroom and to make learning REAL and EXPERIENTIAL.

I started the session by asking them if they had any inside information about the rumour around today that Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat) was coming back to Qatar (I missed him when he was here in September!) in November to give a lecture series. I know that someone in my class must have a relative connected with the Foundation or the royal family and be able to find out for me. I told them this would be an amazing opportunity to meet the author of the book we had designed the project around. I told them I would email Tom myself over the weekend and ask what was up, and that if he does come I would try to set up a meeting for our class. 'What, like a field trip?' they wanted to know. Better! was my response. This will be a unique opportunity to be in the same room as an international best-selling author and to speak to him about the topics you are studying now, the ten flatteners. So....I continued, what would you say to Thomas Friedman?? Do you know your topic well enough yet to be able to converse, ask questions give opinions?? My class were a little stunned, but at the same time I know most of them understood what I was saying. Will they rise to the occasion if it happens? Some will I know.

Another conversation was about the topic 'Connecting the World Online', one of the Flat Classroom topics. The student tackling this one is floundering so I was trying to give her suggestions as to how to focus it. I suggested talking about Qatar and how the Internet is changing life....talk about Qatar Academy and how more and more connected this school is each year....then I reached into my pocket and found the business card of the QF IT Manager and said, right, send this person an email and ASK HIM! What are the plans for connecting Qatar and the Academy in the future? Where is this all going? Don't research it in books or even online, talk directly to the people who make the decisions, tell him you are my student! Well, she took down the email address...we will see what happens.

And yet another conversation with the student tackling the impact of workflow software went like this....I had emailed her the blog post by Jeff Utecht from this week where he talks about scenarios and the use of IT as a student, a teacher and a parent and how software can enhance communication etc. Such a great post Jeff! So this student is now understanding her topic much better and is inspired to move towards planning a digital story using some of the ideas in this blog post. 'Contact Jeff', I told her. Talk to him about this, maybe ask him to record a short video clip and include it in your video.


How are you bringing the world into your classroom?
Photo by Moontan, uploaded July 27, 2005

Technorati Tags: flatclassroomproject thomasfriedman jeffutecht qataracademy qatarfoundation ICTqatar

I am venturing into the realm of students teaching teachers. As a full IB (International Baccalaureate) school Qatar Academy offers the PYP, MYP and DP programmes. The MYP (Middle Years Programme) includes a Community and Service component where students are to find needs within the community and work towards helping and/or solving those needs. This is often problematic in cultures such as the Middle East where kids are not usually allowed out independently to interact with society. A school such as ours usually finds set programs and defines opportunities, such as Animal Shelter, where students can join and participate and help out thereby satisfying the 'hours' or 'projects' required for their C&S commitment for the year.

After requests from teachers for help with implementing Web 2.0 (and other) technologies I have instigated the 'Digital Learning Team'. This is a group of student volunteers who work towards C&S points by doing the following:

• Sign up with a sponsor (Head of E-Learning or other appropriate teacher) and fully participate in an orientation session to be aware of school-wide needed e-Learning skills for teaching and learning
• Find a need amongst the teaching faculty for e-Learning development and training
• Design 5 e-Learning lessons and produce a handout for each lesson
• Schedule sessions with interested teachers and deliver the 5 lessons (this can be done in groups, with a one-to-one ratio)
• Make a short journal entry for every lesson: 1 paragraph for EACH entry- homeroom teacher signs

• Choose one or more of the learner profile attributes (below), and discuss how you demonstrated that quality during this project (1 paragraph or more).

• Make a final journal entry clearly stating what you contributed and learned, as well as what others may have gotten out of the experience.(2 paragraphs or more)

I discussed this with my Grade 9 class today encouraging them to take an interest. I told them how I had deliberated over the title and didn't want it it include the term 'technology' as it sounded too 'nerdish'. They laughed at me and said, well digital learning team sounds just the same to them! OK, back to the drawing board.

Any advice as to what to call a student team of software savvy students who will go forth and multiply gratefully accepted!

Technorati Tags: digitallearning

This week the intense work starts on the Flat Classroom Project for 2007. Over the past month students have been finding each other via the Ning and via the topic wiki pages. Now the real work starts! Each of the 7 classrooms and over 100 students must help to edit the wiki pages from last year AND create a personal video, with a segment outsourced to a team member, in a less than 4 week time frame. The videos this year are using concepts from Dan Pink's book 'A Whole New Mind' as inspiration. Students have been placed in one of these concept groups:

• Design and Innovation Instructions
• Story and Empathy Instructions
• The Fun Factor (Play) Instructions

We are aiming high once again with this project and expect a lot from the students. Already I am pleasantly surprised, or should I say delighted at the output and commitment shown by the top few who have started dedicated virtual conversations and planning towards the end goal.

Here is the music widget from the main wiki page that has a few of the audio introductions from students. Note: to hear more introductions go to the personal page of each student on the Ning.
One of my personal favourites is the one by Zak from Los Angeles County High School for the Arts called, 'Zak's Flat Classroom Blues'.



Find more music like this on Flat Classroom Project


Classrooms for this 2007 project include:

United States:
Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (Barrie Becker)
Mary Institute St Louis County Day School, Missouri (Elizabeth Helfant)
Westwood Schools, Camilla, Georgia, USA (Vicki Davis)
China:
Shanghai American School (Simon May)
Austria:
Vienna International School (Barbara Stefanics)
Australia:
Presbyterian Ladies College, Melbourne (John Turner) PLC wiki work
State of Qatar:
Qatar Academy, Doha (Julie Lindsay). Grade 10 MYP Technology. Class wiki

Once again we are challenged by time-zone issues, hemisphere issues, English language issues to name a few however we are excited by the opportunities for cultural understanding and for heightened modes of interaction and communication facilitated by Web 2.0 technologies.

Invitation to be part of the Flat Classroom Project 2007
We invite other educators to be part of our project by taking on one of these activities:

1. Classroom peer reviewers: If you have a classroom that has a spare 1-2 lessons we invite you to do peer review of student work on the wiki.
2. Digital story judges: All students will have their multimedia artifact (digital story) judged by a team of educators. There is a rubric designed specifically for this.
3. Expert advisers: We invite experts in the field of the 11 topics (Based on Friedman's The World is Flat) to help encourage the students as they contribute content to the wiki page and define their video topics.

So, come on board and join our project, we would love to have you involved. Let us know you are interested by either emailing flatclassroomproject@gmail.com or by joining our Ning, stating in your profile you are interested in being part of this, and sending either Vicki or myself a message.

Technorati Tags: flatclassroom flatclassroomproject flatclassroomproject2007

One of my biggest stumbling blocks as I’ve switched gears from middle to elementary school is individual e-mail accounts for the students. Back in middle school, I could always count on every student having their own e-mail account. Even if, for some strange reason, one or two students didn’t have one, I could just ask them to sign up for one before the next class and it would be done. Alas, nothing is quite that easy at the elementary level….

In our case, for lower elementary students, we really only need each student to have an individual, permanent, e-mail address to sign up for other services (not to actually send and receive e-mail). So, in order to get our second grade class up and running with Ning accounts for our Global Village project (which, of course, require a consistent e-mail address for log in purposes - no mailenator for us), and in preparation for all of our Global Communication Center projects, I spent less than an hour today solving my problem, thanks to Gmail.

Basically, Gmail allows you to create subsidiary accounts linked to an individual Gmail account. Check out this great screencast demonstrating how to create linked Gmail accounts that Alec Courosa made with Jing earlier today (I need to start getting the kids to make screencasts with Jing next - what a great way to create tutorials!).

Basically, this means that one teacher can have 20 permanent e-mail accounts that are all delivered into one teacher e-mail account. Therefore, if the teacher account is teacher@gmail.com, all you have to do is add a “+studentname” before the @ symbol to make a linked account. Therefore mail sent to teacher+studentname@gmail.com will go straight to teacher@gmail.com. Of course, given that Gmail terms and conditions require users to be over 18, we did send out a permission slip to all parents to get their formal approval that we create these linked accounts.

This means that all students will have to learn is “their” e-mail address so that they can log into the Ning (or wiki, or whatever) independently, but they never have to actually see their e-mail, check an in-box, or deal with any spam. This also allows us to be consistent in the classroom, with all students essentially having the same e-mail address to remember - only needing to input their name after the “+” sign.

Also, thanks to the filtering and labeling feature in Gmail, the teacher can filter all incoming mail into specific labels for each student, thereby saving passwords and user account info for future reference, just in case. And, with the (basically) unlimited storage that Gmail provides, this should be the perfect place to keep those kinds of records - accessible from anywhere, by anyone with the teacher password (in this case, both myself and the classroom teacher).

As far as I’m concerned this is the perfect solution for our younger students. It took me less than an hour to set up the initial e-mail account, invite all 18 students to our Ning, accept all 18 invitations, and approve all 18 membership requests. Certainly, it’s not ideal to have the teacher doing all this (especially when I’m used to the students being able to handle sign-ups on their own) but it’s far better than actually having individual accounts and worrying about students maintaining them on their own when they’re 7 & 8 years old.

Bring on the global collaborations! We’re ready!

Tags: elementary, 21stcentury, globalcollaborations, email, gmail, globalcommunicationcenter

Here in east Asia, the big regional conference for teachers is the EARCOS Teacher’s Conference. It’s usually sometime mid-March and all of the schools from this part of the world are invited to attend. ISB is a longtime supporter of the conference and the school actually pays for the flight to the conference, along with the conference fees (but not the hotel room), for all ISB teachers interested in attending. Considering this year’s conference is in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (where I lived for the past two years - ironically last year it was here in Bangkok), I figured it was the perfect year to apply to present. A great experience plus trip back to one of my favorite cities in the world!

Although it’s still a work in progress, I thought I’d share my presentation here as well:

Workshop Title: Developing the Global Student: Practical Ways for Infusing 21st Century Literacy Skills in Your Classroom

Workshop Description: This session will focus on utilizing web 2.0 applications, such as blogs, podcasts, and wikis, to develop 21st century literacy skills within the core curriculum. Metacognition, research skills, and online awareness help students find what they need, learn at their own pace and safely share with a wider audience. How can we incorporate these exciting, motivating skills and technologies into our classrooms? Examples of completed student projects, along with teacher materials and resources, will be shared.

I just started a wiki for all of the resources I want to share, but there’s not much up there yet… I’m actually presenting the same topic in Singapore in November (thanks to Susan Sedro for getting me involved) so I will have all my resources posted by the 16th.

What do you think? Feedback? Suggestions?

Tags: 21st century literacy, globalcitizens, collaboration, learning, EARCOS,

So how does google work?

This question comes up more and more as people marvel at how quickly the answers to their questions are given right back to them. Explaining how google gets those answers back to you so quickly is something few people are aware of.

Before you read on, check out this great visual answer to this complicated question.

I read the Google Story this summer and highly recommend it. It reveals really interesting insights into the minds and ideas that helped shape what is arguably the most innovative companies of our time. Google is always in the news and continues to shape the definition of “SEARCH” in new and exciting ways.

If you do nothing else, turn to the back of the book and just read through the google “entrance exam”. This test is given to all prospective job candidates and is unlike any test you will find in our schools today. Why?

It asks questions you cannot prepare for in advance.

It asks for original thought on the spot.

It asks for creativity on the spot.

It asks questions will many possible answers and possibly no answers.

You can find a sample here

When you hire creative, outside of the box thinkers and support them, great things can happen.

Well worth your weekend.

Let me articulate a bit of the goals of this new project. I should have done this yesterday, but didn’t have the time. Thank you all who commented with ideas, they are great!

Our goal is to create a blog and vodcast to help folks around the world learn Spanish. That’s a tall order, and one that’s been done before in a myriad of methods. Some of the most amazing ones are TryMango and LiveMocha.

We want to do something a bit different, with a bit of 6th grade flair. We in our class often watch short clips of the Jeff Corwin Experience (from DE Streaming) as he explores Central and South America and tries to use his limited Spanish. We then break apart what he says and correct it.

A few days ago we came up with the idea of publically trying to help him. And so, www.teachjeffspanish.com was born!

We decided on teaching Jeff because we felt like it would be so much fun for people to come and learn along with us without feeling like we were teaching “them” necessarily. This just felt like such a fun way to teach Spanish with a focus on Jeff, who seems like the type of guy who would love this kind of thing. And to answer a question in the comments, this would absolutely be appropriate for anyone, anywhere who wanted to learn Spanish or maybe brush up the Spanish learned in high school, etc.

For what it’s worth, this is an all-kid idea and I’ve just implemented what they wanted, and guided them along the way. Cool, eh?

Here is what we’re thinking…

1. A daily blog post, posted and edited by kids, with a new word of the day. We’ve already developed a category structure in which to place the words, and it looks good. There would be one post per day, one word per day. We’re working on ideas such as pronunciation, etc.

2. A weekly vodcast with student hosts (permission slip pending). This is where we’re stuck. We want something amazingly fun and quirky that will help you learn/improve your Spanish in a practical way, but without it being cheesy or corny. For as silly as it was, Guinea Pig TV was so much fun!I wish it was still around.

That’s what we want, something viral, something fun, something that will catch some notice because of the quality. I’ve got a kid who knows iMovie so I’m going to let *her* use my personal MacBook Pro to cut the video.

We just need a great idea. Can someone contact Marco Torres for me?!

Any feedback is welcome, and remember, my kids are watching this like a hawk, so talk to them!!

Tags:nextgenteachers teachjeffspanish

This past Monday evening, at 7pm Bangkok time, the ISB Learning Hub team (including our fabulous admin team: Annelies, Struan, and our superstar tech coordinators: Justin and Dennis) got “geeked” as we watched the pre-conference keynote of 2007 K12Online Conference here in our fabulous Learning Hub:

We started by watching the 2006 keynote presentation by David Warlick to get us ready (and to pass the time while we waited for the 2007 keynote, also by David Warlick, to download), all the while taking notes and discussing how we can bring these kinds of 21st century literacy skills into our classrooms here at school. The amazing thing about the keynote, was that while we were here in Bangkok discussing what we were learning, we were also connecting with our colleagues all over the world, via both the backchannel chat that David set up, and Twitter.

I love being a part of these conversations to confirm my beliefs and to stretch my thinking. It is so empowering to feel part of a network of learners that stretches beyond the people I spend every day with. A while back I wrote a post about feeling isolated as an international school teacher (as I am so very often the only teacher in my department for my grade level), but in the last year, beginning with the K12Online 2006 conference, all of that started to change.

Once I began making the connections, through the use of these fabulous web 2.0 tools, I realized that my colleagues are not only here in Bangkok, but also in Korea, Qatar, the Dominican Republic, Singapore, China, the UK, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, all over the United States and Canada, the list could go on and on (and clearly I need to update my blogroll…). And thanks to my personal learning network, and the constant connection, collaboration and creativity they inspire I am learning around the clock!

Sometimes it’s hard to stop and reflect on all this learning, so here’s a start: my notes from the Pre-Conference keynote and from the Fireside Chat. No time to waste as the first of the presentations are starting today!

Notes from the K12Online Keynote

• In the 21st Century we learn by teaching each other, we learn by sharing what we’ve discovered.
• Side trips were the definition of my education.
• There are no boundaries any more - walls are coming down - putting kids in contact with what they’re learning about.
• Teachers and students are looking for new boundaries, to find traction to move forward: A common context to work together and accomplish individual goals and shared goals
• Educating a generation without boundaries is not going to work - our task is to find/invent the new boundaries.
• Resourcefully create boundaries to go where we need to go - traditional boundaries are going away, we need to be resourcefully inventing, creating boundaries to move forward.
• I had no reason to believe that my job as a teacher would change for the rest of my life. It would have been impossible for me to predict that my future would look like this.
• Last generation looking at their parents and believing they are seeing the future. Our kids know that things are changing so fast that they don’t know how they will be making a living in the future.
• School used to prepare students for their future
• Freelance workers, free agent educators, maybe a better model for the future.
• For the first time in history we are preparing our students for a future we can not describe.
• The children who are in our classrooms are not the students who we think we’re teaching.
• They are not natives in a land that is in anyway stable - their journey continues, they have grown into these technologies,
• Digital immigrant is not an excuse - it is to get rid of our accent, our children are doing this by accepting that technologies have continued to grow, and they pay attention, they celebrate and adapt to the change
• They learn because they’re part of a network, they’re connected, they may not know how to do something but they have a community they can learn from.
• The real digital divide is that some people are part of a network, part of a community, learning together, collaborating, power in the community - the others are alone, there is no power there.
• Power in the community, there is power in learning together.
• Networked children have “alien” powers: can see and hear through walls (cell phones, texting, etc)
• College students never have to say goodbye when they go off to college - because they carry their friends in their pocket
• Games, social networking teach children how to collaborate, how to work in a team
• We want our students to be the children we want to teach, rather than teaching the children that they are - this is an insult to our children (27 min in)
• The nature of information has changed - information landscape used to be hard, unchanging, ever-lasting, expensive to produce so we wanted it to last.
• How we use, find information, how it flows, what we can do with information has changed: Information is becoming increasingly networked, digital, overwhelm, participatory, reader directed, information often comes directly from the author - without benefit of traditional gatekeepers like librarian or publisher.
• Other skills just as critical to literacy: find appropriate info, evaluate information, organize information into personal digital libraries
• What happens when all information is made out of numbers? what happens to arithmetic - numbers now apply to the full range of content, and we’re overwhelmed with information. We need to decide what information we’re going to use
• Being literate involves producing an information product and message that competes for attention in the same way that products on a store shelf competed for attention in the industrial age.
• Our notions of what it means to be literate must also change.
• Where do I want to be 10 years from now? How able am I to do the things I want to do? What can I do today to prepare myself for that future?
• Health: we still need human bodies to carry us from place to place.
• Information is independent of time and space: we can be disconnected at one individual moment, but still be connected
• Today we can reshape information
• Students can be re-mixers of content, provoking more important learners - it is so much in the grasp of those of us who are paying attention
• Used to want a hilly classroom : teachers up high, learners down low - gravity drives curriculum
• Our students are now publishers (57% of teenagers have produced original content and published it on the Internet, and engaged in conversations with their viewers - how many of their teachers have done the same?) - from perspective of their information experience, many of our children are more literate than their teachers
• Our classrooms are flat: how do we drive learning and curriculum when we can no longer rely on gravity
• Three conditions converging on our classroom, we tried to avoid, contain, block them out
• Best thing for us to do is realize that these 3 converging conditions can become new boundaries off of which, we can gain traction
• They are:

1. We are preparing a generation of students that are info and tech savvy, know how to play the information, but they don’t know how to work the information, they need us to help them work the information. These kids that are coming to us from an information experience that is far richer, far more personal than anything we have in class - there is energy in that. We need that energy to help us teach and learn without gravity. Kids energy comes from their intrinsic need to communicate, to share their personal experience and identity, to ask questions, to accomplish things, form and participate in communities, to invest themselves, to safely make mistakes, to earn audience and attention. There is enormous energy there that we can tap into.
2. New information landscape, networked, digital, overwhelming, participatory, flows and unflows, connects and re-connects. There are opportunities to create experiences for our students where they are working responsibly, sharing themselves and collaborating, within the context of the curriculum.
3. First time in history we are preparing our kids for a unimaginable future. The best thing we can be teaching our children today is to teach them how to teach themselves.

Notes from the Fireside Chat

• Regarding games, if parents get scared about kids spending too much time on their games, they will overreact - at least from the kids perspective, and then the children will be less likely to continue a dialog with their parents about this topic. The dialog between parents and children is so important that you don’t want to loose that simply by overreacting.
• Pay attention to how students learn, and teach them in that way. Kids should be telling the story of what they’re learning, how they’re learning, right now - “give a megaphone to our students.” Get out of the way and listen to our students and they’ll tell us what they need - Sheryl
• Teaching helps you learn - students teaching students/teachers helps them take learning even deeper.
• “Teachers should be the directors of learning, not the teachers” - Arthus, 14 year old student
• 21st century teacher should be a master learning - demonstrate what learning is about, not what teaching is about
• Learners are leaders - leading their own future and the others around them. Learners must respect each other, and be respectable - critical that any notion of literacy include the ethical use of information, ethical practice and habit of learning.
• Any classroom where students are not using digital, networked information, is not acceptable, that teacher is not teaching, they are not preparing students for the future. It is not an option anymore.
• Classrooms need to be about new kinds of conversations. Students need to learn how to engage in conversations about learning with people in their world - around the world - that are creatively crafted by their teachers, to learn what they need to learn. By creating those conversations, and engaging in their learning in a networked way, they are learning authentically.
• What’s new, now, is the conversations that are happening. These are the conversations that are the key to learning.

For those of you that were unable to attend on Monday night, don’t despair! All of the conference events are posted on the conference blog and will be available permanently - you can even go back and watch all of the presentations from last year!

Check out these links to get you started:

• www.k12onlineconference.org - The main conference blog
• The Schedule of Events - See what’s coming up
• Where do I start? - A guide for first time attendees
• Preconference Keynote - from David Warlick

And, just in case you are still wondering why you should attend this (free, online, just in time, amazing) conference, take a listen to this fabulous podcast by Chris Betcher and you’ll be geeking out before you know it!

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