Not So Distant Future

Something about being in a different place, or maybe a place so rich with literary history, makes you realize that learning isn’t just something that can go on in school, but all around you.

The Monterey area is like an outdoor learning laboratory–you hear sea lions barking at night or can watch them from the wharf, you can explore tide pools or watch sea otters swimming off shore–or you can look out and see farms much like John Steinbeck must have seen 75 years ago.

Being away from familiar sites makes me realize how much the world around our students wherever we live is a learning laboratory.   There is much potential for us  to expand our thinking about what school “looks like.”

On the plane, I watched Brian Crosby’s K12 Online presentation video on “obstacles to opportunities” which was awe-inspiring.  I think what I found so moving about it was the way he has expanded the world for his students and what opportunities they will now believe are open to them as a result of his teaching.

I’ll be sharing ideas from the Internet Librarian conference this week that we can use to open up our schools and libraries so that they can become  global laboratories for our students.   (Edublogs is having some difficulties by the way, so if my blog becomes unavailable during the conference for any length of time, you can follow me on technolibrary.tumblr.com, which is a scrapbooking site where I’ll share my thoughts.)

What if you held a conference and attendees came from every part of the world?   The K12 Online conference concludes this weekend with just such a culminating event–a 24 hour around the world online chat known as “When Night Falls.”

 To “illustrate” that event, the conference organizers have invited participants to join a new flickr group, When Night Falls, and share photographs of night falling around the world.  

The photographs already posted are from places as diverse as Canada, Australia, Bangkok, and even Texas.   It’s  awe-inspiring to look through the photographs and realize that educators from all of the places pictured are attending this conference–it makes it much more concrete how global the conference is.

So, add photos from your corner of the world–Join flickr if you aren’t a member, then head to this wiki for instructions on how to add your photo to the group.   Remember to tag it with k12online07 and whennightfalls as well.

Join the global community and watch night fall around the planet!

Image credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/superkimbo/1027339192/in/pool-whennightfalls/

The coolest new tool I’ve learned so far from the K12 Online conference is Gabcast, which Liz Kolb highlighted during her presentation on Cellphones as Classroom Learning Tools.

Gabcast allows you to record a podcast directly from your cell phone, by calling a 1-800 number (once you have set up an account)!   Talk about convenient!  

I haven’t had time to finish watching Liz’s presentation, but it has many practical sites and tips.  Ironically, last week our faculty watched “Pay Attention” which includes a segment challenging educators to try innovative ways to use cell phones in the classroom.   During workshops we had yesterday on campus, several teachers were able to view Liz’s presentation, so that was timely for us!

Other K12 Online presentations I can’t wait to view–Jeff Utecht’s, which was posted yesterday, on Sustained Blogging in the classroom, and one I’ve been eagerly awaiting, Dean Shareski’s Design Matters, which goes live today.   In fact, though I’ve only had time to dip into a few of the presentations so far, I know they’ll be there when I have time!

If you’re new to the conference, there’s also a live chat in Elluminate tomorrow (morning at 8 a.m.–early here) if you want to try a new tool and meet some other conference attendees.   

And if you haven’t had time to watch Clarence Fisher’s Classroom 2.0, I thought it was an excellent introduction!   See you there!

   True confessions time–when I was little, I used to play teacher.(also used to play librarian, geologist and nurse!)    Playing teacher involved reading the instructions from a reading test booklet aloud, standing in the front of the bedroom explaining things, calling out spelling words, and the like.

Wouldn’t it be incredible if five or ten years from now the way that children play teacher would be by putting their dolls in groups to work together,  or by wearing a toy headphone and pretending to talk to students from around the world, or by saying “students, let’s create something together?”

Clarence Fisher’s truly incredible keynote for the K12 Online conference(which I’m sure I won’t do justice to) illustrates what Classroom 2.0 can be.   He lives in a small town in Canada, and begins the podcast by saying, education used to be about training people to work here, where they live.  But now students can live and work wherever they want, so he believes that educating them needs to help them meet the world head on.

As he writes on his blog, Remote Access, “I live in a small rural community and think geography is irrelevent on our hyperconnected globe. This leads to the tagline of my blog: ‘Even From Here.’  ”

His comments about attitude are profound:  that if we redefine what classrooms are, and see them in a new light, then it changes what is possible, it changes scheduling, it changes what activities are permitted, it changes everything.

I think another change that we need to think about is the idea of content.   AP students cram down content for the AP test, students studying for our state’s TAKS test do the same, but it seems to me there needs to be a shift away from content, and it also strikes me that this is an incredibly hard change to make in our thinking and in our educational structure as it exists today.

As Clarence points out, our very relationship with information is changing.  We, and our students can be prosumers, can consume as well as produce content.   We aren’t passive recipients any longer.  So what does this mean for our relationship with the content in our classes?

I’m a person who believes there is almost always a “third way”–a way to work within the system we have, while incorporating evolving ways of interacting with students.  As Clarence so deftly illustrates by embedding the idea of networking into his first day of his classroom, (he has students start setting up blogs the first day of class and Skype with another class the first week), we can create an atmosphere where networking is an expected part of the learning process, just by modeling that in our classrooms.

  Our students will, no matter what we want to believe, end up in a much more connected and networked world than we have now.  There will come great gains in that, and also losses.  But if we’re going to teach them, we have to start believing that world exists.   And we have to believe that world has validity and value. 

Because don’t we want to be right there with them, learning, exploring and guiding them into that networked world, into that future, whatever it will look like?  Don’t we want to be there, helping them make good choices, helping them detect bias and prejudice, helping them learn how to communicate well, helping them learn  how to collaborate across time and across geographic lines?  

I sure do, and I feel just as excited putting on a headphone as I ever did, years ago, reading the instruction manual to a test booklet aloud.

As he says in the presentation, ‘It isn’t about us waiting to be told how to do things.  It’s about us.  It’s about change, about us figuring out what we need to do to make sure kids are prepared to meet that future head-on.’

He’s right.  It is about all of us.

Technorati tag: k12online07cl01

Image credit:  Flickr acpl, lwatebuddy

   Last week, we began our campus inservice by viewing Darren Draper’s “Pay Attention” video, which generated some complex discussions.   Bill Martin, an English teacher at our campus, commented afterwards that he felt it was critical to be thinking about the pedagogy involved in using the tools that Darren challenges us about in the video.

Chris Lehmann and Kristin Hokanson have posted similar comments on their blogs as well recently, and I agree completely.  Chris comments after posting an incredible interview with his students at SLA about their learning: 

“As we think about 21st Century tools and reforming education, we need to remember that we use the tools to leverage the relationships, to extend the relationships, to push a progressive, inquiry-driven, understanding-driven, project-based way of teaching and learning, but without the pedagogy, the tools are nowhere near as powerful.”

Kristin describes interacting with Arthus(a student in Vermont) in a spontaneous chat recently, who reminded her that the ability to teach students to think critically is vitally important.   She cites his comments:

“Yes, we are content experts and we have lot to share but as Arthus said, the most important thing we can do is learn how to learn.”

My enduring enthusiasm for technology is because I envision how it can help us teach and learn better–not “entertain” kids, but teach(and learn), in truly transformative, globally connected ways.

The K12 Online Conference sessions begin on Monday, and one of the reasons I’m eagerly looking forward to the conference is because of sessions that will help me think about ways these tools can transform teaching and learning.   I’m really looking forward to hearing Anne Davis’s session on “Putting the Pedagogy into the Tools,” and Clarence Fisher’s keynote, “Classroom 2.0″ the first two days of the conference.  (In fact, I’m looking forward to hearing all of the presentations, but time may not allow to hear them all “real-time.”)

One of the great things about the conference is of course, that you can listen to sessions months later, when you do have time, or when they pique your interest.   The organizers of the conference have also just posted information on how to get professional development credit or even graduate course credit for the workshops.

And if you’re interested in learning about how the conference got started, or want to hear from some participants from last year (admission–I do appear in this podcast briefly), check out these great interviews from Chris Betcher’s Virtual Staffroom Podcast.

I’ve been a part of the pr committee for the conference, and I have to admit that one of the really fun parts of doing that is working on a committee with Chris–who I hadn’t met before.  It’s pretty amazing to work on a committee via Skype with such dedicated educators from New York to Australia to Alabama(not to mention the time zone challenges involved!)

Hope you’ll check out the conference this week, sign up on the attender map or sign the conference guest book, and join us for as Chris Betcher says, “global conversations.”

Technorati tags:   k12online07, k12online07cl01, k12online07cl03

  I’m really looking forward tomorrow to David Warlick’s K12 Online Conference keynote, which will be available for viewing on the K12online conference site starting tomorrow morning. 

Last year about this time, I stumbled over the information about the conference on someone’s blog, and was blown away when I watched the keynote address.  

If you want to take a trip back in time, or you missed last year’s, here’s a sampling of what David had to say about last year’s conference and what is so different about K12online:

“Traditional conferences act like traditional teaching and learning experiences. I face you. You face me. You all face in the same direction. In this conference we are not only facing in different directions, and not only in different locations, but you are reading this blog and watching my keynote at different times. We are free from what Chris Anderson calls the tyranny of locality (Anderson 17). You’ll spend some time paying attention to me and others, but the best part of this conference will be the time that you are reflecting on what you see, hear, and read, and then writing in your blogs and populating wikis, and then reading other people’s reflections, and reacting. This conference is not as much about teaching and learning as it is about building new knowledge.”

The notion of building knowledge together is a very powerful part of the conference.  It’s put on completely by volunteers–organized by volunteers, presentations created by volunteers, chats hosted by volunteers, website created by volunteers….and that makes it even more powerful that a group of teachers from around the world could come together cooperatively to make an effort like this work, and do all of the planning and coordinating online, using tools like Skype and Elluminate to communicate. 

One of the really exciting aspects about last year’s conference for me was connecting globally with other educators for the first time.  At the end of the conference, in the 24 “Night Falls” event, I was able to use Skype while sitting in my house to talk to teachers in Wales and Scotland.  (wish I remember now who I was talking to then!)    It was my first real taste of how powerful it could be to connect with other educators at other schools, no matter where they were.

So I am looking forward to meeting all of you “online” in the next few weeks!  Here’s to kicking off K12 Online tomorrow!

The K12 Online Conference starts Monday with David Warlick’s keynote address, which will be posted Monday morning(USA time) on the conference website.

 Sylvia Martinez has a great post explaining the conference, if you would like to know more.   She compares it to “comfy slipper learning” because you can learn whenever it’s convenient for you.

The website has added some new areas, like a helpdesk area, which will be activated soon, if you want to participate in the live events, but don’t know how, and a “newbies” area for people new to participating.

We’re planning to host a “house party” in the library here on Monday and show the opening keynote with refreshments to get our teachers started participating.   How about a ”tech talk group” for teachers to share outstanding programs from the conference they watch(like a book study group, but sharing good presentations)?  

I’d love to hear of other ways campuses are promoting the event–share here if you like! 

 The inimitable Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach of 21st Century Collaborative has tagged some of us to share what we find valuable about participating in the K12 Online Conference.

Last year about this time, I stumbled over this conference, barely understanding what it meant to have an online conference, but wandered in and gave it a try.

What I found were some amazing presentations,(like David Warlick’s keynote that is still worth watching), a global community (that was my first experience using Skype and it was really a thrill to be talking to educators in Wales and Australia, while sitting with my cat), and a wealth of information I could come back to(because it stays online) later on.

The conference really broadened my experience of what educators could do with their students and some web 2.0 tools. And that was it.  I was hooked.

If you want to share the information about this conference, share this flyer with someone you know, or send them to www.k12onlineconference.org to find out more about it.

k12onlineflyer_letter.pdf

If you’re reading this, I’m tagging YOU to share your perceptions of the conference.