One of the most transformative conferences for me, over the past two years, is the K12 Online Conference (k12onlineconference.org). It began last Monday, with the posting of the Stephen Heppell’s keynote conversation, “It isn’t the 20th Century Anymore, So Why Should We Teach Like As Though it Was“.  Some of you heard refered to as working with the OWPP on their school design project, during our North Shore Educational Summit.

Today and for each of the next nine school days, four presentations will be posted online for your viewing. The conference conveners have made the presentations available in audio only, and video formats. Each is less than 20 minutes in length, making them very accessible to you to view.

Over the past two conferences, whose presentations are still available, I have been introduced to tools such as wikis, Moodle tricks, and GabCast.

When you have a chance, check out the different presentations. They will be worth the time and energy invested.

Also check out the three remaining live events, the two fireside chats (October 25th @ 9:00 a.m. and October 30th @ 7:00 p.m.) and the When Night Falls (October 31st – November 1st, from 7:00 p.m. – 6:59 p.m.) These events allow you to connect with educators around the world , sharing the thoughts and ideas collected over the next two weeks. You can join in even if you haven’t had a chance to sample the presentations.

One of the tools that I have and enjoyed is Inspiration. I have used this product since 1989, when a forward thinking local school system purchased it for its teachers and I had to train them on how to use it. I have always been a visual thinker, which is one of the reasons that I loved my Macintosh computers and why I think that tablet technology is an increasingly interesting tool for users.  The ability  to create diagrams and then simply create outlines, the ability to export a series a diagram into a web site were some of the great innovations.

With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies led me to begin to look for an equivilent solution so that multiple people could work on the same project. Many offered some of the tools and functionality of Inspiration, none of them had the full sets of features available.

At NECC, I heard the rumors that Inspiration was coming out with a web 2.0 edition of their product. I was excited about the possibilities and anxiously awaited its arrival. This morning, while scanning my reader, I saw a post by Kevin Jarrett (Inspiration comes to the web: meet MyWebspiration.com!) and I became excited.

Over the course of the day, I have begun to play with myWebspiration.com. Truly a beta product, it does not have full Web 2.0 functionality. It does have the ability for a group to collaborate, but unlike the Google products that I have been using, only one person can be editing the document at a time. There is not the ability to embed the document. The only way to access the document is to save a copy to your local hard drive and further manipulate it in Inspiration 8.

It does allow for all of the features I have come to love, such as rapid entry and the ability to switch between visual mode and outline mode. From Leigh Zeitz, I hear that this product will stay in beta and available for free for an undetermined amount of time while they are testing the waters.

It is a solid start and I look forward to seeing enhancements in the upcoming months. It is a something to watch develop and grow.

Do you want to take the leap into a personal learning network, but not sure which one is right for you? Why don’t you think about joining an online book group. There are two that I would like to highlight for you.

The first can be found at Teacher Places Book Clubs. In the past, this group has discussed Gardner’s FIve MInds for the Future, Medina’s Brain Rules, and Christenson’s Disruptive Class, all books which have had a huge impact on my thinking and understanding. They just have released there fall lineup, which looks extremely impressive as well:

First up is Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism.  Publishers Weekly says of the book:

Weighing in on a discourse that includes both visions of “clashing civilizations” and often equally misguided cultural relativism, Ghana-born Princeton philosopher Appiah reclaims a tradition of creative exchange and imaginative engagement across lines of difference.

Next is Beverly Tatum’s Can We Talk About Race?  The Boston Globe writes about this book:

A provocative and important book . . . What Tatum seeks to do above all is trigger sometimes challenging discussions about race, and infuse those discussions with a reality-based focus on how race affects us all. Her latest book does that beautifully, asking tough questions, and patiently, inclusively seeking answers.

Finally, for December, we are going to tackle Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.  The review from Publisher’s Weekly says:

Manjoo rounds out his analysis by examining the workings of “partisan news realities,” and he points out that the first casualty in these truth wars is a basic human and civic need: trust. Though several of the author’s ideas are repetitiously threaded through his narrative, Manjoo has produced an engaging, illustrative look at the dangers of living in an oversaturated media world.

All three books look to address key issues that we, as a community of colleagues and educators, need to engage if we are to help our students, our schools, and our communities to navigate a world where divisiveness and sophistry appear to reign.

Additionally, a group of teachers at Stevenson High School have begun a year-long book study on Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics. This book talks about how collaboration in the business place is beginning to change the way business is done. The focus of this group is to talk about how the ideas apply to education.

We have been invited to participate if you would like the schedule for the reading is not cumbersome. It is:

Timeline:
9/24 Read Intro through pg. 64 (Ch. 1 & 2)
11/5 Read pgs. 65 – 124 (Ch. 3 & 4)
1/21 Read pgs. 124-182 (Ch. 5 & 6)
2/4 Read pgs. 183-238 (Ch. 7 & 8)
3/18 Read pgs. 239-287 (Ch. 9 & 10)
4/30 Read pgs. 288-315 (Ch. 11)

To participate in the conversation, visit the following blog – http://wikinomics-book-study.blogspot.com/

From the Google Teacher Newsletter:

All around Google (and all around the world), there is buzz which is quickly turning into a roar about this November’s election. Google has teamed up with the National Student/Parent Mock Election to get students of all ages as excited as we are about the November U.S. elections by bringing into the classroom some of the same tools and technologies that have changed politics in this country so dramatically. To get a sense of just how dramatically the Internet has changed politics, consider this: YouTube didn’t exist during the last Presidential election, and yet today it’s a central part of the political dialogue. To check out some of our tools and technologies, please visit:  http://www.google.com/educators/elections_tools.html

Elections Tools for Teachers makes it easy to bring some of the best Internet tools into the classroom to get your students engaged. You’ll find descriptions and suggested learning activities for tools like YouTube, Google Maps, Elections Video Search and Power Readers. Check it out and send us your feedback:  https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pTM7o25sgF7ywCqyk_gZzXA

The Northern Illinois Computer Educators (NICE) are hosting their first meeting of the year on Tuesday, September 23, 2008. The meeting will be held from 4:30 to 7:00 pm (Dinner from 4:30 – 5:15 ish , Presentation 5:15 – 6:30 ish) at Lyon Elementary School in Glenview, IL. Lyon is located at the corner of Lake and Waukegan.

The presentation for this meeting is a Share-A-Rama! Atendees will share their summer discoveries; good books, new websites, new technology tools, share feedback from summer classes, workshops, and conferences.

The cost of the meeting is $5, which helps offset the cost of the food for the meeting.

The University School of Milwaukee is hosting a conference, the Next Generation Teaching and Learning Conference, on Monday, October 13th from 8:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. on their lovely campus.

The conference will be keynoted by Alan November (novemberlearning.com). I do not know the topic of his keynote on this day, but in the past, his topics have included Cultivating a World-Class Work Ethic, Creating a New Culture of Teaching and Learning, and Student as Contributor:Digital Learning Farm.

After the keynote, there will be two one hour break-out sessions. In addition to Alan, the following will be presenting:

Sharon Peters, from Montreal (http://wearejustlearning.ca/) will be presenting on Learning without Borders and her experience in Africa this summer

Steve Hargadon (http://stevehargadon.com) will be presenting on Web 2.0 is the Future of Education.

Additional speakers will be announced shortly

After lunch, there will be a 90 minute hands on workshops on a variety of topics, so you can begin to apply what you have learned from the morning sessions. The day ends with a reflective processing time, where participants are encouraged to develop individual learning goals, curricular learning goals, and for the teachers at USM, departmental learning goals.

If you are interested in attending, please contact your division head and myself. If you have further questions, please contact me.

I am highlighting a group of tools that I have found on a blog post by Richard MacManus, who writes a blog called the Read/Write Web. In a a post called the top Spanish Web 2.0 Apps from August 2006, he highlights the following applications which I think may have application in our classrooms:
Tagzania – a geomapping site with excellent features; you can create your own “geoposts” and it automatically produces a KML file of your posts for Google Earth. Here is Eduardo’s account and the KML of his videos (in the form of a travel videoblog). On this site, there are a number of French Resources

Podcasts: Comunicandoand Triunfa en internet
QDQ has pictures of thousands of buildings in Spain, so you can search for an address and see what the building looks like (type Castellana 2 for instance in the street address in Madrid).

From this post, here is an interesting fact about Spanish Web Tools:

An interesting fact about Spain’s web apps is that most sites are presented with multilingual engines. Eduardo told me that Spanish Web entrepreneurs think that Spanish-only sites have a limited audience – “only 300 million people or so” (!) – so a lot of them create multilingual apps.

There are other applications not highlighted here that you can take a look at yourself.

One of the highlights that I have listened to at the K12 Online Conference is a presentation by LizKolb on the use of cell phones as data acquisition tools in the classroom. Two of the new tools that she highlighted were Gabcast and GCast. After setting up accounts at each site, they allow you to create a podcast using a phone call, from either a cell phone or a land line. Here are two examples of podcasts that I created today. The first is a Gabcast podcast what I believe the uses of this application could be in a classroom and the second is a podcast with my reflections from our Diversity Workshop, plus how this can be used in the classroom. Both are rough cuts and unedited.

Just beginning to work with these tools, one of the advantages that I can see using Gabcast is that I can download the mp3 file easily to edit, allowing for this be be used in the field and then podcast at at a later point. From a quick examination, I cannot find the same features using GCast, which is the older program.

Gabcast:

GCast:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.gcast.com/go/gcastplayer?xmlurl=http://www.gcast.com/u/vvrotny/main.xml&autoplay=n0&repeat=n0&colorChoice=6' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' quality='high' pluginspage='http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer' width='145' height='155'" width="145" height="155" wmode="transparent" /]

Technorati Tags: k12online07 k12online07nt02

If you want to share various documents with students, you have to be concerned whether or not the students will have the application and the correct version of the software that you used to create the document. This is especially important when sharing SMARTBoard notes or tablet inkings on Moodle or with others via email.

Enter Personal Document Format (pdf). From web sites, we have been downloading pdfs which we can then either read on screen or print out and it will retain the characteristics of the original. Most modern web browsers include a plug in from Adobe, Acrobat Reader. But to create a pdf required paying for Acrobat, which was cost prohibitive.

CuteFTP Writer is freeware which enables a user to “print” a pdf document. Downloading and installing both CutePDF Writer and the converter will provide users with the ability to go to their print menu, change from a printer to CutePDF, and create a file that all users can open and print.  This is a neat utility.

The K12 Online conference kicked off today with the posting of the Pre-Conference Keynote by David Warlick. There is both an audio and a video component of the presentation. ( http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=144). On Monday and Tuesday, there is a live chat that you can participate in ( http://davidwarlick.com/k12onlinekeynote_chat/signin.php ) and on Tuesday at 6:00 p.m., there will be an opportunity to participate in an live discussion, facilitated using Elluminate (https://sas.elluminate.com/m .jnlp?sid=2007095&password=M .E8E484E55C29AE1DE2356659DBF40C). These later two events are a great way to begin to create the relationships with other across the world.

I would reccomend that you check out the conference blog (k12onlineconference.org) daily in order to follow the conference. Beginning next Monday, October 15th and continuing until Friday, October 26th, there will be four sessions a day that will be available to “attend”.. (See a schedule of sessions).

Additionally, there are live Fireside Chats on Saturday, October 20th and Tuesday, October 23rd, where participants can converse with each other and with the presenters.

The culminating event, When Night Falls, will begin on Saturday, October 27th at 0:00 GMT. This 24 hour event allows for participants to connect with each other and provides a starting point to keep the conversations alive.

For me personally, the conference last year:

1. Transformed me in positive ways which I am just beginning to understand. It challenged my notions of what should be done to prepare students, faculty, administrators, and parents to prepare them for the shifts that I believe are happening in the world around us. I have begun to act up those notions in my professional practice.
2. The presenters last year mentored me to making a real commitment to embed the use of these new tools into my daily practice. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the opening keynote speaker, David Warlick whose presentation pushed me to blog consistently for the past 11 month now, to Vicki Davis whose hands-on activity on wikis provided me with real experience as to how wikis can be utilized in the classroom, and to the contributions of other presenters such as Mark Wagner, Jeff Utecht, Chris Lehmann, and Ewan McIntosh.
3. Many of individuals who I got to meet during the As Night Falls (scheduled for October 26th – October 27th this year) I now count amongst my friends. They have provided me opportunities to grow and learn both professionally and personally. And from this group, I have been introduced to an even larger pool of people who now fall within my friendship group. I now feel that I can travel nearly anywhere throughout the world and know that I can connect and share with these great people.

The beauty of the conference is that it remains available beyond the scope of the three weeks, so you can “attend” when time, energy, and motivation permits.

Technorati Tags: k12online07