Not So Distant Future

I’m so thrilled that NECC08 will be in San Antonio, because it’s one of my favorite cities and favorite getaways (and I’m sort of a local, being from Austin).

So, since it’s summer and I was thinking about it, I have put together a wiki for planning your trip to San Antonio in 2008 (never too soon to start !).   I’ve stayed at, eaten at, or visited almost all of the places on the lists, so these are based on personal experience.

I’ll add more as we get closer, but just to get you started…  If you want to add to it, email me.   The page will be stored on the NECC Notes page, for future reference.

Happy planning!

I rode the subway to the Atlanta airport yesterday.  The people getting on looked weary, for the most part, weary, footsore, and like they worked hard.  

I started thinking about the session at NECC on Digital Equity that Barbara Bray told me about, and about Joyce Valenza’s comments about how it’s a responsibility of educators to be aware of equity and access issues for their students, to fight for them to have access, and to help locate tools for them that are free.  

I was thinking about the One Laptop Per Child project, and how that will impact a whole generation of children.   (even if the laptop doesn’t succeed, it is succeeding in getting the other players in the game motivated to work on something similar).  

I think Joyce is right.  

What bothered me about this subway ride is when I started thinking of all those people on the subway as though they were our students(and some of them are or were at some point).  I started thinking about what we were talking about at NECC, and how few of the people I was riding with had probably been afforded the opportunities to share their stories, learn to be information fluent, to create art, and I wondered what we can collectively do about that?

I thought of what I’d heard about schools in Philadelphia, and D.C., and inner city Houston, and many other places, of articles I’ve read about school buildings with mold, leaking ceilings, where nothing works, where the kids with the most need get the least experienced teachers.  

I read about the Supreme Court ruling today, and worry about the impacts it will have.

I thought about the videos that Tim Tyson’s students made, attempting to change someone’s mind about an issue.  One of them asked what we would choose.

And I thought, mirroring their question–What will we choose?  

Aren’t these kids worth it?  Aren’t they worth beautiful school buildings, computers that work, teachers who care, educators who help them become fluent in this new 2.0 world, tools that help them tell their stories and share them with the world?  

Education can be a great equalizer.  Technology can provide access to worlds and knowledge beyond our own.

 And isn’t it time to spend the money to provide all of the children in this country beautiful, clean, inviting learning environments?    The best teachers?   The newest technology?

When are we, as parents and as educators going to ask our nation–aren’t these children worth it? 

Collectively, those of us who were at NECC and those of us in education know a lot.  We’re contributing a lot at our own schools.  But how can we, as part of our writing, our talking, our workshops, and our efforts to craft a compelling message about transforming education–how can we keep these children and these parents in mind?

Even if they aren’t in our own school or our own neighborhood, aren’t these children, as citizens of our world, worth it?

Update:  7/1   Will Richardson’s take on his experiences in small town Georgia here.

I see edublogs has started working (now that I am finally home).   I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it is fixed.

I sat in on a good session with the Women of Web 2.0 today, and we were talking about handy web 2.0 tools.  But the one we forgot to mention and that hasn’t had much talk about it at the conference was the one I most appreciated tonight on my flight back to Austin–

my iPod.

After taking a bus, subway, having my flight cancelled, changing airlines twice, going through security twice, riding an escalator, elevator, moving sidewalk, and changing terminals two times, I found this tool to be the best possible thing to have with me.

As my flight finally took off from Atlanta, I turned on my iPod, plugged in my earphones, turned on Eliza Gilkyson, and looked out the window at the peaceful moon and finally had a tranquil moment soaring above the clouds.   Now that is the perfect technology item.  It transformed my mood and helped me create my own space to think and daydream and plan.   Add in a good book (Eat, Pray, Love) and I could finally relax.

The conference was great.   Met a lot of interesting people and learned a lot.  But it’s 2 a.m., I just finally arrived in Austin after another hour and a half flight delay in Houston, and I am sooo glad to be home.

More thoughts on the conference tomorrow.

Edublogs has been having a few issues lately, so I’m posting on an alternate site– www.technolibrary.tumblr.com for NECC until things smooth out!

I just got back from seeing a new mockumentary film, Chalk, which was filmed at a high school here in Austin.   Think of the program “The Office” set in a school, and you get the general idea.

While the school portrayed in the film certainly wasn’t what we’d call a “21st century school” or an example of best practices at all, the film did get some things right about the humanness of teachers, about teaching being an art, and about the little arcane aspects of working in a school, like copiers that are always broken, old water fountains, eating your meals in a lounge, mail slots in the mail room, etc.

And it was definitely painful and touching watching the new teacher’s awkward efforts to comprehend his job.    He poignantly comments that no one really taught him to teach, and it does seem true that much of the time in education that you have to find your own way.   I do believe as he says that teaching is a gift, and perhaps not something you can entirely be taught.

I’d recommend seeing it–I find it hard to relate to many “school” movies because they are so inauthentic–too cliche and feel good.  This was just a quiet, humorous, film that humanizes teaching a little bit, even the worst parts of it.

(P.S. Sorry for the slow pace of  posts lately.  Edublogs has been changing servers and it’s been slow.  I’m hoping to be blogging from the NECC conference starting on Saturday, so I’m hoping it gets faster by then.)

I’m looking forward to meeting many teachers who are leaving a mark on their students and their schools and libraries.   See you next from Atlanta!

Welcome to any principals who stop by from my session at Texas Association of Secondary School Principals on web 2.0 tools for administrators!

Some blogs we talked about in the session as a good starting point:

Mabryonline

LeaderTalk

Practical Theory

Educational Discourse

G-town Talks  (and I quoted her superintendent)

Dangerously Irrelevant

I also highly recommended Will Richardson’s book, Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts, as a good place for administrators to learn about all things web 2.0.

Thanks to those of you who attended the session!

For some summertime “play,” here are a few new tools that I found on Karen Janowski’s blog about assistive technology– She has posted a very extensive list of helpful study skill types of tools.

My favorites from her list?  

Bubbl.us is a free brainstorming tool.   We have Inspiration on our district computers, but what about when students get home?  This tool can help them create mindmaps, complete brainstorming activities, and organize their thoughts. 

The added advantage?  They can share their mind map with others, either allowing them to just view their mind map, or granting them permission to also edit it.    One tip–for the younger students, you might want to teach them to press the zoom button in the top left corner to make them larger and easier to manipulate.

PBL Checklists allows you as a teacher to create a checklist for students, like a writing evaluation sheet or an oral presentation checklist.   They have some preset examples that you can select from.  Or you can type in your own checklist items.  When you click on create printable checklist, it organizes your list for printing–a very helpful tool for creating rubrics/checklists.

However, the one from her list that makes me say “wow” is Eyejot,  a video email tool.  So instead of writing an email, you record a video with a webcam.  It is stored until the recipient has time to watch it and record their response.  It works along the same lines as Yackpack for audio.   This has great possibilities for students with special needs, bloggers, teachers communicating across campuses, or families.

Photo credit:  “Pipecleaner Art”  http://www.flickr.com/photos/cobalt/35978363/

iTunes U – university content offered via iTunes.   It’s not just audio podcasts but video as well. ( Thanks to Patrick Higgins at  Chalkdust for passing this along. )

So, what changes when academic courses become this accessible to everyone who is interested? 

It’s less than two weeks until the NECC Computing conference in Atlanta!

I’m very excited to get to attend an Edubloggercon, which is a sort of self-organized conference of bloggers who are attending the larger NECC conference.  The participants are using a wiki to volunteer to organize different sessions and NECC has donated space for us to meet.  It’ll be my first time to meet most of the teachers and writers whose blogs I read.

If you are interested, and want to participate from afar, there is a wiki site where you can add yourself to the list of those who want to “listen in” remotely.  I’m not sure how the remote participants will participate but it should be an interesting experience with this many educators gathered in one place!

By the way, next year’s conference is in San Antonio–hopefully many from our district will be able to attend!

     Change–why is it so difficult for schools and what can we do about it?   That’s the theme of a weeklong thread at Dangerously Irrelevant that I highly recommend. 

I ran across an article in Time Magazine this morning, “the Ewww Factor,”  about a marketing study by Andrea Morales and Gavan Fitzsimons which found that the “disgust” factor associated with an item can be transferred to another item associated with it.  So the delicious cookies in the shopping cart can be “tainted” by the negative association with the cat litter next to them in the cart.  (I have this same issue with raw chicken touching any of my groceries!)

The end of the article explains that their next study covers the opposite effect–that is, that a positive association can transfer a positive vibe to the associated object.

As a librarian, I completely believe that the research will prove that to be true.   When we booktalk a book, or show a class a cool and helpful website or database, students gravitate towards using that.    When teachers recommend a book to their class or a movie, students have a positive association with that.   

Witness an example of this in a 9th grade classroom blog from Arapahoe High School, where a ninth grader who is the “class scribe” for the blog is describing her teacher’s review of the summer reading list.  She obviously cares about her teacher’s take on the different literary works on the list.

I think this “touch” translates to technology use as well.   I think as we use and share these tools, it can give  it a “positive association” on our campuses if we have a good relationship with the staff and students.  

So all this brings me back to the idea of change, and that personal relationships in an organization are an extremely important part of change.  The enthusiasm and support that a librarian or a technology specialist or a principal shares with a campus can create that positive “vibe” that creates an inviting environment for change, and just maybe, according to the new study, it “rubs off” on others.

Photo credit:  Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/dawn_perry/318923932/