Professional Networking for Lifelong Learning

My thanks to the organizers of Texas's Virtual Education Conference '10, held this week Nov. 9 through 12, for the opportunity to meet a quality handful of new colleagues via my presentation last night. I did prepare a PowerPoint for it, though through the effort of adapting that object to the Elluminate10 platform I'm beginning to see value in starting out building a presentation in its whiteboard-based interface and will likely play with that during February's 4 webinar series with ESBOCES in New York. At any rate, on my way to my morning treadmill workout I want to offer the original PowerPoint here.

Focusing on only three elements of a PLN, it's chocked full of resources for an educator just starting out building a one, which for me has two "P's," Professional and Personal. Maybe I'll start abbreviating it "P/PLN" to make that point.

The 1 hour mini-event, moderated magnificently by Kim Caise, will be archived at the site, and if it's available via guest access I'll post the link to it right here. I had fun, and I learned some things myself. Please feel free to share:

PLN4LL

View more presentations from Scott Merrick.

Practical Theory--A View from the Classroom

"We need school and district administrators to create a culture of innovation where teachers and students can bring new ideas, new tools and new ways of thinking to the subjects we have at hand and be rewarded for their innovation. When that happens -- when teacher learning through non-traditional means is valued -- then we can a) expect to really see change and b) hold teachers accountable when they don't. Until that day, we will see the early adopters and the risk-takers bring new ideas to bear on the classroom, but I don't think we'll see wide-spread adoption of any tools at any rate faster than general society."

--Chris Lehman, Principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia.

Chris is an award-winning educational technologist who has taken his views on the potential of new teaching and learning tools to turn around the decline of our schools into his work at SLA. I will be spending this week catching up on his blog archives. Want to join me? Visit Practical Theory -- A View from the Classroom. Last one to understand it all is a rotten egg...

New Snacks4theBrain! Podcast Features NECC2007!

Hey! Just finished posting episode number 58 of Snacks4theBrain! and thought it might be good to let everyone know here. The 20 min. podcast features snippets from Peggy Sheehy, Kathy Schrock, and Chris Dede--all three of whom presented stellar talks at the National Educational Computing Conference in Atlanta, Georgia (Chris's excerpt is from his keynote the subsequent "online learning institute" tagged onto the tail end of NECC). Go visit the S4theB! blog to listen and learn more.

Oh, for those monitoring for news of the new podcast "uber-device" to which I alluded in my Windows Podcasting talk at NECC, the current news is that its release is set for October of this year. As soon as I have leave to let out more I promise I'll do so right here (though you'll probably hear of it elsewhere as well--it's too big an innovation to escape large press).

If you haven't already, check out and keep an eye on the developments that will blossom over at the Web 2.0 in Education's week-long workshop at the University School of Nashville next week.

Chris O'Neal at the "online learning institute"

Wow.

Chris O'Neal, University of Virginia, working with the Virginia Dept. of Education to provide professional outreach to teachers. He also teaches classes at UV and is pursuing his doctorate in Research and Evaluation. He also is presenting the Panel introduction to the second set of roundtables here at the ECB/SERB "online learning institute."

Some notes:

"If my 11 year old is so tech savvy, what about her little 4 year old cousin who's doing things Chloe didn't do until she was 8? The question I want to ask is "are we ready for these kids?"

Chris showed the video I shared with my teachers just three weeks ago, Mike Wesch's "The Machine is Us." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE .

I like him already.

Teachers need to ask these questions about 2.0 tools:

• applicability to classroom--content, needs, standards


• dependability


• ease of use


• student safety and information literacy


• teacher tech savviness and student media literacy


• copyright and fair use concerns


• tapping into the myspace mind
  

"The digital divide that we do have control over" is who gets computer time in school. What happens now is that the kids who have all the tech at home get the most computer time at school."

"You can have this whole PowerPoint if you want it. Just copy it, delete my name and add yours...I don't care."

Wikis offer collective editing--a whole roomful of teachers editing a document

http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english

On Wikipedia, "the benefit of collective intelligence is also collective ignorance. Absolutely tell your students to use Wikipedia, but let's put it in the context of curriculum and tell the ppl who contribute to Wikipedia "Listen, the person who's coming after you is my 11 year-old so you better make sure your information is correct because she's going to research and correct it if it's not."

Losing track at the moment because I'm getting so into this talk. It will all be online at http://ecb.org/ within the week.

Big Announcement for Attendees of My NECC Windows Podcasting Tools Session!

(part of the audience!)

I had so much fun sharesharing yesterday for the ~240 dedicated teachers, administrators, and technologists who packed my Windows Podcasting: Tools, Tips, and StraTegies for Success (ISTE dropped my internal cap on the last word in its title but I thought it was cute, don't you?) and want to thank you all for being there. Please feel free to add my feed to your RSS aggregator of choice for that podcasting device announcement I teased you with!

The winners of the two giveaway FlipVideo devices (THANKS, Simon at puredigital.com!!!) were Bruce Dale, Technical Support Specialist at Rabun County Schools in Tiger, Georgia and Brenda Thompson, teacher at Madison County School District in Flora, Mississippi. Congrats!

Seven other lucky winners took home items from FTC Publishing and some random other things from my office, including a Works Suite package and a 2003 Britannica Encyclopedia on CD (the boobie prize, to be sure but most likely a bonafide antique worth keeping). I want to sincerely apologize for the pandemonium that accompanied the prize drawing process (if you can call it that) but folks, I had NO IDEA that my session would be such a sellout, and had a process prepared for drawing prizes from a pool of certainly no more than 100...

Here's the announcement I want to make today: I have 100 magnatunes.com (remember, the cutting-edge independent music distributor website offering free music to podcasters?) to give away, courtesy of the generous John Buckman at Magnatune. You have to trust that I'll work out a good way to pick the first 100 emails I received in the mad rush to win yesterday, and winners will receive an email with an attachment to save that will have a gift card number to use on the website for up to 10 dollars worth of music. Most full albums at Magnatune average a price of 8 dollars, and John's hope is you'll "get" the unique service ethic there and come on back when you want new music that hasn't been filtered by the (all caps) MUSIC INDUSTRY musicmill.

Again, thanks so much and check back for more pictures here!