While I was in the backchannel chat today, I thought “wow, everyone in here is ahead of the curve and is pretty sold on what this conference is promoting,” which happened to be Web 2.0 tools.  The theme of the conference isn’t the point, but the fact that we were all chatting away in a gigantic Echo Chamber started to bother me.  There wasn’t anyone on that chat that was disagreeing with anything that was being said, even when prompted to.

The point is, most of us really want to change education.  We aren’t going to do that until we get more teachers, administrators, district personnel, lawmakers, and politicians involved.  To do that, we should invite them places. Get them to witness what we are trying to do.  Get them to argue with us and make us justify why we are changing education in this particular vision.

So, for all the conferences we are planning on going to this upcoming year, let’s either make sure we bring a person that doesn’t agree with us or might not understand what we are doing, or if money is an issue, have them REPLACE us at that conference.  You know they will get more out of it anyway.

This will take some work.  We will have to be unselfish, almost altruistic in some cases.  In other cases we will have to work hard to convince colleagues they should attend and will have to hound them to say yes when they don’t want to work over the summer or write extra lesson plans for a sub.  Whatever it takes. This is easy in the scheme of changing education!

Conferences in the next year that I really want to go to and will make PLUS 1 a reality in: K12 Online Conference,  Virtual Schools Symposium, Educon 2.1, NCCE 2009 , and NECC 2009

I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership recently, largely due to Influencer: the Power to Change Anything, and despite not having any ‘power’ at my job, am trying to influence change.  Thats where printing this idea comes to play.  In the past, I might of just kept it to myself but am trying to influence public discourse in some small fashion.

Wordle is one of those sites where you can enter in text and it gets turned into a word cloud.  You can copy your url, a blog post feed, your delicious account or just simply paste some text. I came across it here, and after reading Karen’s post wanted to try out my own blog to see if my ideas were being backed up by my words.   Glad to see they are.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I’m always looking for little quirky Web 2.0 programs that I can introduce to my students so really enjoyed coming across Stripgenerator in one of Larry Ferlazzo’s many posts about about web tools.  I see it as a tool kids can use for making introductions to unit projects or spicing up presentations.

At NECC Week, I had been playing with a Flip Cam that my work bought for students taking my Web 2.0 class next semester.  I needed to learn how to use it in case kids had questions , so brought it along and recorded a few short clips.  I was more interested in playing with the camera rather than making a video, but decided to put together a pretty disjointed compilation of what I was able to record.  It has a few highlights though, some scenes from EBC including, Ewan Macintosh’s request for Pearson Learning to turn off their cameras (he was intimidating so I did too after that).  It also has a bit from David Warlick’s session, from Steve Hargadon’s Social Networking in Education session,  and a few other snippets if you’re interested.

1.  I was asked to present at Virtual Schools Symposium about Shared Leadership in a discussion called “How to Start an Online School” then shared leadership seemed to stop at my school when summer began.  Feeling a little torn about making that presentation now.

2.  I just went through an online training program for Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium, CT’s new state online school.  I was able to look inside some of the responsibilities their teachers have for developing curriculum (almost none) compared to our teacher’s responsibilities for developing curriculum (100 %).  My hypothesis is that teachers who use pre-packaged software solutions can focus more on supplementing instruction, personalizing assessments, and communicating with students than those that have to spend a lot of time building online content.  More hypothesizing to come.

3.  I was just at NECC2008 and there were almost no relevant sessions about online learning.  I attended one and it was terrible, antiquated, inapplicable to my situation or any online teacher’s situation who has taught for more than 5 days.  There was nothing in any of the dozen or so E-learning sessions that I thought could benefit a hybrid high school teacher.  I think I found a topic to propose to NECC for next year.

4.  Clayton Christensen predicts half of all high school students will take online courses ten years from now.  If that comes true, my career experience is going to be very relevant to the future of education.

5.  A trusted colleague in my PLN asked me to talk to her principal about the challenges of online learning for credit recovery.  Her school is thinking about offering online classes next year.  Even though the challenges are so vast and so many, I still believe in online learning. That said, everyday I question the potential of online learning as a valuable option for at-risk kids.  I’m spending my life trying to figure out a way to teach at-risk kids online, but am losing so far.

UPDATE:  NACOL just released a paper on the role of online schools for at-risk students, stating

As online learning moves past the early adopter phase, the growth
of online programs focused on at-risk students or credit recovery has redefined how educational technology can be used to address the needs of all students, from advanced students in search of Advanced Placement or dual-credit courses, to at-risk students trying to find the right instructional mix to fit their learning styles.

The last half of that last sentence is especially relevant to our learning model.  We need to find the right mix to meet these kids learning styles because we are failing nearly 50% of our students right now with another 20% dropping out.  Anyone have any ideas for the right mix?

Those 5 things really have me thinking about online learning and interested in seeing where it goes in the near future.  I also look forward to tackling these things in future writings, which I haven’t really done in a year of blogging.  Wonder why not?

NECC 2008 was the best conference I’ve ever been to.  Mostly, because it was so dynamic.  Usually I judge a conference only on the quality of the sessions but this one was so much more than lectures.  I wanted to take a couple minutes and reflect on the Goods, Bads, and Bests from NECC Week (EBC, NECC, and NECC Unplugged).

Easily, the best part of EBC and NECC2008 was meeting people from my personal learning networks.

The 2nd best part was participating at NECC Unplugged.  I didn’t get to schedule a session there because my travel plans were made so close to the conference that I had no idea if I would even be attending past Monday afternoon until a couple days prior.  So when I got to sit-in and contribute to an impromptu roundtable conversation with Steve Hargadon, Darren Draper, Robin Ellis, Karl Fisch, and several others from my PLN, I was excited.  We discussed how EBC could be better next year along with social networking in education.  I had been a passive observer at the Blogger’s Cafe until that point, and it feels so much better to contribute to the community.

The third, and last, best part is a little of a selfish one.  I hosted a poster session called Using Web 2.0 to Motivate Student Creativity which focused on Web 2.0 for Beginners and it went really well.  A lot of people stopped to watch our (OCHS) kids talk about their experiences using these tools.  I met hundreds of people and loved talking to educators who really wanted to make their children’s experiences at school more relevant.

The Goods.  The best sessions I sat in were all at EBC.  They were discussions yet, only one of the sessions that I attended at NECC was even close, mostly because they hosted a backchannel chat (pw:necc) through Chatzy. David Warlick and Alan November didn’t dissapoint but Social Networking in Education was the livliest and most passionate session that I attended outside of EBC.

The Bads.  By far the worst part about NECC Week was the lack of wireless connectivity.  In over half the rooms I was in I had nothing, nada, zilch for connection.  Kristen Hokanson said it best to an IT guy trying to solve the problem at EBC once he declared they had no idea so many people would have laptops, “but this is an edtech conference.”  They didn’t have enough access points and in the theater where the spotlight sessions were at, there was nothing.

Those view-blocking Pearson cameras at EBC were annoying, but I wasn’t nearly as mad as others about them recording and profitting from our words.  Spreading information…..good.

The other bad part, which I have encountered at almost every conference I’ve attended, was their take on Online Learning.  When I went to NECC in Philadelphia a few years back, I don’t remember any online sessions so was happy to at least see that strand in almost every concurrent session.  However, most of the sessions weren’t worth attending, the NACOL booth didn’t even have someone sitting at it, and the one session I did attend was horrible.  It was three instructional designers from the University of Houston who lectured for 45 minutes straight about 3 basic lessons you could teach online.  It was like they just discovered e-learning and somehow convinced ISTE to accept their proposal.  I wish they would screen for people who are really doing something with online learning and hybrid schools, its a future of education.

flickr user: kjarrett

For the past year-and-a-half I’ve been meeting, collaborating, sharing and learning with people in a variety of online personal learning networks (PLN).  I turn to them when I need some help.  I turn to them when I have research to share.  I turn to them when I need advice or a recommendation.  I turn to them when I want to discuss personal achievements.

I’ve learned a lot about a few people, and a little about a lot of people over that time.  Even if I have never had a discussion outside of following someone’s updates on Twitter, there is an interesting connection.  It’s hard to understand but many people that I talked to this week described similar feelings about their “friends.”

I had never knowingly met anyone from my online networks before EBC this weekend.  But what’s really interesting is that didn’t matter.  In fact, it even enhanced the conferences.

When we met face-to-face for the first time it was like we had known each other for years, even if we had just met on the NECC Ning the week before.  All those walls that people throw up when they are in a social situation in which they don’t know anybody were completely torn down.  Conversations were instant, passionate, and left off right from our online discussions or posts or thread or comments.

Everyday my belief in PLN’s is reinforced and this weekend/week proved the most powerful of all reasons for having online social networks.  Even if I never meet the people I learn from, and that learn from me, we still have something important online.  However, there is just something really special about the experience of meeting those nodes from my network that strictly online connections can’t ever quite equal.

flickr user: Kasia/flickr

novemberlearning.com has resources for researching on the web
His new book is called Web Literacy for Educators

Opening story about 17 year old son- only people who are not connected are his teachers.  Schools have become the learning police.  We are so worried about children safety that we block learning possibilities.  In an effort to protect children are making them unemployable.

Alan is asking questions and ideas below are based on group poll:
Right now government regulations own the learning but students should own the learning.  Lack of leadership, type of curriculum, and lack of vision are the biggest barriers.  District filters big barrier to students working globally with other students because block IM, Skype, and blogs.

We are not doing a good job of teaching students how to facilitate their own learning.  Example, teachers do not allow tests where students can research answers using the Internet. Not utilizing “open source” ideas.

Step 1 in teaching kids to be globally competitive is to understand how Internet works and learn specific syntax and grammar. Examples below:

site: countrycode = for Google results from specific country
view: timeline = organizes Google research by dates
link: url = to find out how many links are going to a site

Recommends creating own customized search engine in Google with own reviewed sites.  Kids should do this, build it in class.  Schools can design and share with community.

Teachers shouldn’t be allowed new technology (pd) unless they bring 2 kids with them.  Kids will spread what they learned quickly.  For some children it might be easier to learn from kids rather than teacher.

We need more voices delivering content!
Kids need to own the learning, change the job description of children.

Collaborative web tools in class. Kids can all produce one presentation together (google docs), so all students have access to all the content all the time.

Wikipedia isn’t just an encyclopedia, its a publishing center.  Use it as a tool to get kids publishing.

Kiva.org, place where kids can make a contribution to online information.  Loan money to entrepreneurs.  Get money back later.

6 Jobs to Restore Ownership of Learning to Students

1.  Every classroom should have a student researcher, at least one.
2.  Every teacher should have a student led curriculum tutorial design team.  These tutorials should be available for Ipods and Dvds.  Ex.  Students create screencasts (jing) on how to solve different problems or teach how to do something in class.
3.  Can create podcasts that help teach class.
4.  Google Docs – Kids help edit writing or presentations together, official scribe team.
5.  Teach kids to add value to the world.  ex.  go to Wikipedia and add content.  Can have kids work collaboratively on an entry for an assignment, then can monitor the changes through an RSS feed of the history.
6. Teach kids mathematics of investment into global groups and link it to curriculum.  Have kids raise money for this.

There was a 7th job but ran out of time, so need to go to sites for complete notes on session.

David Warlick’s – Our Students Our Worlds
21st Century Global Learning

What kind of library might I design if Im not constrained by walls.  Shows example of file cabinet on 2nd life.

In straight rows, performing repetitive tasks, under close supervision. How old schools are designed, and what was required for industrial jobs.

We have to teach our kids to be able to prosper in a time of rapid change where we can’t predict the future and there jobs can’t be defined yet.

Develop a workforce where workers can create a niche career for themselves based on their creativity and developed skill set.

May want to read Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, resonates deeply in the ed community.

May want to read Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class

For the sake of our economy, we need to invest in creative students.  The creative class jobs are opening up.  Keep art classes, drama classes, and history classes going.

Today’s kids have “no formative recollection of the 20th century.”   Our high school students enter at 14.  Born in 1994 so 6 at turn of century.

Kids dont have to say goodbye when they leave HS today because connecting is so easy that they don’t expect to leave forever or leave anybody behind.

I wondering about the digital divide.  He speaks of kids wexpecting to have the ability to access the tech they normally use once they enter classroom.  What about the at-risk kids that are so far behind.

Kids need to know how to find people to get help from.  We have to teach them to develop personal learning networks they can turn to an instant.

Real danger of digital divide is the network connected kids have but kids left behind will be alone and wont be able to access information within networks.  We need broadband for all kids.

Entire country of Macedonia is wireless.  But in US, if you can afford it you can have if not too bad.  Must change.

Need to have deep conversations with kids to try and discover the real value behind social networks so that we can just use one and dont need a separate one for everything.

Kids have invented a new grammar through IM and Text language which is developed for 21st century.

Wombat = waste of money, brains, and time

Video games coming up as new learning engines. Spore

Games Learning Society, conference about using games for learning

“machinima” production techniques with computer generated imagery rendered using 3-d tools

Our students think of things as raw material where we had cd’s to listen, books to read, movies to watch, but kids think about how they can remix that data and create something new

the Longtail learner, review a little more

lulu.com self publishing, you must market yourself, also get indiv. web page on the site.

We need to create producers of content, and teach how to do properly.

Innocentive, problem solving site

64% of teenagers have produced original digital content and published it online, they more literate in many ways than teachers.
Ajax Chat possible back channel option for future presentations

Handouts available at http://handouts.davidwarlick.com