USN Summer Camp Offering for Educators!

My school, University School of Nashville, offers a number of summer opportunities each year. The building some weeks seems even busier than it is in the school year. This coming summer, I'll be offering a week-long, half-day experience for teachers to give them the opportunity to explore social media and Web 2.0 tools under the guidance of moi and in the company of like-minded pioneers. You can find the description here and register for the workshop at the USN Summer Camps website, and you can investigate a bit more about the content matter at my "Web2.0forUS!" wiki. The week is limited to 16 attendees, and we expect seats to go quickly, so register soon!

The path to register is a bit long and circuitous, set up as it is mostly for children's summer camp opportunities, but I hope the following directions will help:

1. Visit the Summer Camps website
2. Click on Register Now
3. Select Adult from the pull-down menu
4. Scroll down and check the box for Social Media and Web2.0 for Educators!
5. Create an account as a Non-USN StudentFollow the prompts to select payment options and register!
6. If all this is too daunting, email me at smerrick@email.usn.org with the subject header, "I want to learn Web2.0 this summer!"
   
   

07/19/2010 - 07/23/2010$225

Adults 18 and up

Social Media and Web2.0 for Educators!

1. Instructor: Scott Merrick
   8:30 - 12:00
   
   Come spend a week of half-days with Scott Merrick, University School of Nashville's Lower School Technology Coordinator for 11 years and ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) Core Volunteer Leader. We'll get hands-on experience with social media of all kinds every day and explore the life-long learning potentials that these offer the tech-savvy educator. Scott will guide you through the intricacies of social bookmarking, media sharing, blogging, and podcasting. You will leave the workshop with your very own Professional Learning Network jump-started and energized for the future, wondering why you didn't get started with it sooner but glad that it's underway.
   
   See you in the summer!

Advance Announcement: Social Media and Web2.0 for Educators!

This will go out officially around Jan. 1, but I wanted to make the announcement here immediately, especially since it has a cap of 16 on the signup!

My school, University School of Nashville, offers summer camps and workshops for both students and adults all summer long under the auspices of a robust program under the direction of the capable Mr. John Kleiner. Just this morning I received copy to proof for the summer brochure, and I want to share it with you. More information about application process will be available soon. Meanwhile, if you want to go on a wait list for first shot at application, feel free to email me at smerrick@email.usn.org with your contact information (include Summer Social Media and Web2.0 for Educators! in your subject header) and I'll see that that happens. It may be the cheapest (and most fun) date of your summer!

Social Media and Web2.0 for Educators!

• Instructor: Scott Merrick
• Week - July 19 - 23, 2010
• 8:30 - 12
• Adults 18 and up
• Come spend a week of half-days with Scott Merrick, University School of Nashville's Lower School Technology Coordinator for 11 years and ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) Core Volunteer Leader. Sessions will run 8:30 to 12, M-F and will take place in the Lower School computer lab. We'll get hands-on experience with social media of all kinds every day and explore the life-long learning potentials that these offer the tech-savvy educator. Scott has years of experience with social media and virtual environments and has led workshops for ISTE (see http://iste.org), for the Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach, and for USN over the past decade--most notably his "Web 2.0 for US" series (see http://scottweb20.wikispaces.com) and the Second Life Playground at NECC2009 in Washington, D.C. His professional portfolio is online at http://www.interfolio.com/portfolio/scottmerrick/. Scott will bring his extensive learning network into the workshop, including Classroom2.0, Twitter, Facebook, and ISTE's SIGVirtual Environments. He'll guide you through the intricacies of social bookmarking, media sharing, blogging and podcasting. You will leave the workshop with your very own Professional Learning Network jump-started and energized for the future, wondering why you didn't get started with it sooner, but glad that it's underway!
• Requirements: An inquisitive spirit, an open mind, and a sharing disposition.
• Cost: $225.00
• Limit: 16
  
  

Right-Brain Ahoy

Last night, thanks to my lovely wife Lee Ann's mindful oversight of the arts programs at my school, with an eye toward faculty professional development and our school's commitment to balance in life, I participated in "Painting Made Easy," a two hour one-off workshop led by Whitney Ferre'. Whitney is the founder of Nashville's Creative Fitness Center and co-owner of Rumours Wine Bar. Thanks again to Lee Ann (the brains and powerhouse behind my school's annual art show, artclectic), I joined another faculty colleague, kindergarten teacher Jason Hooper, in the learning experience. It was fascinating, enjoyable, and most of all, relaxing.

I walked from the workshop with a 12x14 canvas, its thickly applied acrylic paint still drying (especially on the trees, perhaps a bit overworked but finally completed to my moderate satisfaction). Here's a photo of my masterpiece:

Whitney's philosophy of creativity and its role in the balance of life is expressed, quite eloquently, in her new book, The Artist Within: A Guide to Becoming Creatively Fit.

In the course of my little reaquaintance with how much fun it can be to push and pull paint around the surface of a stretched canvas, I learned that Whitney is a blogger. Her website at creativelyfit.com features blogposts from January of this year (welcome aboard, fellow blogger!), and they are looooong and innnnnnteresting! Anyone interested in balance in life should take a visit to her collection of insights and news centered around the "art" of art. As for me, I plan to read them while on my step-machine surfing on wireless-connected laptop, and I also plan to pick up some small canvases and to continue to take little relaxation vacations on a more regular basis! Thanks, Whitney!

Summercore for a Summer Learning Experience!

I'm copying here an email announcement from old friend Steve Bergen, Chief Information Officer at the Harlem Storefront School in New York. From experience, both my Tech Director Wiz (Kathy Weiczerza) and I can testify, from direct experience, that this four day multi-band educational technology experience (now offered in the Northeast and in Florida!) will leave you with great ideas and powerful learning experiences that will make your teaching easier, more fun, and immeasurably more effective. Steve Bergen is a pioneer still pioneering! Need a ProfDev experience this summer? Just DO IT!

Scott

http://scottmerrick.net
----- Original Message -----
*** do NOT reply to this email ***
*** instead use sb@cstorefront.org ***
good morning everyone
1) we are returning to Horace Mann School for the 3rd consecutive
year July 13-17, 2009 for a Summercore open to everyone
2) we are returning to Shorecrest Preparatory School in Florida for the
8th consecutive year July 27-31, 2009 for a Summercore open to everyone
3) please spread the word to other teachers and administrators at your school; registration info posted on http://www.summercore.com thanks so much ... I hope each of you is doing well and look forward to hearing from you if you have time to write ...
Steve
p.s. at my school -- The Children's Storefront -- in Harlem, we have started a "penny drive" with the goal of collecting 1 million and then 1 billion pennies in case you might want to support us or partner with us ... pictures and "penny problems for kids" are posted at http://www.cstorefront.org/pennies ... we were featured on New York
channel NY1 the other day and you can see the videos of me on that web page ... CBS World News is coming out TOMORROW to film us ... we think we might be on television on Sunday 3/15 right before 60 minutes (not really sure) ... Lynne made me buy a new sweater for the occasion ;-)
***
do NOT reply to this email ***
*** instead use sb@cstorefront.org
***
Steve Bergen ... primary e-mail is now sb@cstorefront.org
CIO and Computer Teacher, The Children's Storefront
70 East 129th Street, New York, NY 10035
An Independent School in Harlem
Web site:
http://www.thechildrensstorefront.org
Tech Saturday Info is posted at http://www.techsaturdays.org
Penny info is posted at http://www.cstorefront.org/pennies
also co-director, The "Summercore" Teaching Company
until the Pats go 19-0 ...
http://www.summercore.com

Summercore 2009 includes:

• June 15-19 at Castilleja
• June 21-26 at New Canaan Country School
• July 6-10 at Berkeley Carroll
• July 13-17 at Horace Mann, NY as well as
• July 27-31 at Shorecrest in St. Petersburg, FL (open to public)

We're Scheduled for NECC 2009!!!

Just checked my presenter's login page and our two workshops at NECC2009 are now scheduled!

These are both fee-required 3 hour workshops, one for "n00bs" and one for "experienced users only" and they're limited to 30 participants each, so hurry on out there and get registered for the conference then get your housing (filling up fast!) and sometime in mid-February, when the workshop program is announced, go back online and get registered for the workshop that fits your needs! I'll remind you here once the schedule is public!

Here's the skimmy:

TA405 Introduction to Education in Second Life: n00bs UNITE! [Workshop : Hands-on] (43604107) Scheduled: Tuesday, 6/30/2009, 8:30am–11:30am
Co-presenters Cathy Walker, John Miller, Lisa Linn, Peggy (Norton) Sheehy, Jane Wilde, and Jeff Agamenoni

and

WA507 Educators' Toolbox and Skill Set: Instruction and Presentation in Second Life [Workshop : Hands-on] (43605147) Scheduled: Wednesday, 7/1/2009, 8:30am–11:30am
Co-presenters Cathy Walker, John Miller, and Marianne Malmstrom

Yay!!!

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy!

Bloom's and Churches' side by side
courtesy http://www.openeducation.net/2008/04/11/blooms-taxonomy-and-the-digital-world/

Every teacher has heard of Bloom's Taxonomy, the progression of skills and objectives that it's held teachers must address in order for true learning to take place. If you've never heard of it (because perhaps you've not had formal training as a teacher, or perhaps because you were out with mononucleosis the week it was taught in your pre-service teacher courses), here's a Wikipedia article that's a good place to begin.

This morning my colleague Penny Phillips, erstwhile High School Technology Coordinator and Director of our newly established Computer Science Department at University School of Nashville, sent out a tech group email with a link to Open Education's rundown of a new take on this foundational concept. New Zealand educator Andrew Churches has created a freely available 40 page .pdf file explaining his reworking of Bloom's Taxonomy for the Digital Age. It is a resource worth having on hand if you are interested in helping prepare your students for the future which (if I have heard it once I have heard it a million times) we cannot begin to imagine.

Here's Churches' own site. Remember to read it, and once you understand it, apply your analytical skills to evaluating it for ways to create new valuable learning experiences for your students!!!

The "Embedded Practicioner," -- Words of Blogging Wisdom from an 8th Grade English Teacher

I didn't mean to do it. After all, I had already spent over an hour in Second Life earlier in the day at a fantastic panel discussion on "Virtual Identity," the discussion facilitated by the dana centre in England. That panel featured Howard Rheingold, coiner of the term "smartmob" and widely acknowledged creater of the concept of "virtual community," and Will Gardner, founder of the non-profit "Childnet International," an internet safety organization created to "help make the Internet a great and safe place for children." I did some recording there but haven't had a chance to do anything with it. (I hope I can, since it was really wonderful.)

So when I logged in on my laptop at my boy's bedside while he went to sleep last night (he doesn't really need that anymore--it's just a tradition with us, one that I'm sure I'll be losing soon as he breaks into teenagedness) I never intended to get caught up in another online presentation. I made the crucial (propitious) mistake of checking out the happenings at the Auditorium on ISTE Island.

Friend Kevin Jarret (KJ Hax inworld) manages a wonderful Tuesday night speaker series over there, and his blog, "The Story of My Second Life," was one of the first ones that motivated me to begin blogging my Second Life experiences. Last night, KJ offered Torontan 8th grade English teacher Konrad Glogowski (SL: Konrad March) on the topic, "The Embedded Practicioner," sharing information about his journey from attachment to his "teacherly voice" to the development of his "readerly voice," which a teacher attempting to nurture literacy skills with blogs must, in Konrad's view, adopt.

Take 20 minutes and listen up to the segment of the talk I choose to share. If you are interested in educational blogging with students, I feel it's a "must listen!" Then head on over to Konrad's blog, "blog of proximal development," for more. I'll add the pics I took here soon, but here's one for starters, the one referenced early in Konrad's presentation, when he's talking about what most of us traditionally, and habitually, call "teaching":



Cheers,
Scott

Social Networking and Education--and book review

I just posted a long book review I think belongs only at my Second Life blog but thought some might want to see it there.

And Andy Carvin just tweeted a new blog post, this one an embedded slideshow from his Social networking and Education talk at the University of Maryland/Baltimore's School of Networking. Hey, why doesn't Vanderbilt have a "School of Networking!?" One critical element of his show is a slide called "Overcoming Fear," which references the Byron Review, a good resource to know about.

Here's the slideshow:

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Speaking to a group of students at Peabody College Grad School--Web 2.0 for Us

Just to chronicle a diversion in my normal path in working with teachers, upon the invitation of a colleague at my school (the wonderful Genie Tanner), I stepped into "higherhigher" education Friday early evening. More or less successfully tailoring my Web 2.0 for Us evangelic message to the assembled group of 15 or so graduate students in the College of Human Development, in a class entitled "Advanced Information Systems," I struck out across the street armed with a wiki page I'd slapped together in the morning as a fulcrum. The tools I share are so dynamic and immediate in nature, somehow locking down a talk about them into a framework of sequential bullet points seems counterproductive.

I explained early on to the mostly business-centered students that I was trying to wean myself from PowerPoints. I predict that I will return to presentation software someday, but I'm not going to use it at all for a while.

See below for the simple wiki notes page I made, and the one Genie put up on their own wiki during my interaction with the students . Both of us were 'sperimenting :). Here's the interesting thing, at least to me: Compare the two and you'll see how my non-linear approach enabled me to play off questions and ad hoc insights to share more than I may have shared with a traditional PowerPointy presentation. If you are in the presentation "game," how do you pull it off? Are you grounded in PowerPoint? What else works well!?