Joining the conference from afar

Want to get some summer inservice without dealing with airports, rain and flight delays? If anyone is eager to hear some fascinating speakers like Tim Tyson, Marc Prensky, Alan November, Chris Lehmann or Christian Long,  and is interested in using Skype, David Jakes is planning to skypecast some of the sessions from the Building Learning Communities conference this week. He’s posted a list of sessions starting on Wednesday.  (If you haven’t used Skype, you can download it for free, and it has a chat feature […]

Reflective learning — following the conversation

  What is the real  shift in how our students learn and how we teach?  I spoke on the phone recently with a good friend of mine who taught with me an eon ago 😉  She went back to teaching last year for the first time in 15 years, and commented to me that when she taught before, the internet didn’t exist, and how much it had changed her practice and ability to find new connections for her students.   It really drove home for me […]

Pieces loosely joined

   What follows is a random assortment, pieces loosely joined, from sessions that I attended at NECC.  I’m sharing these fragments here as a way of helping myself make meaning of them, and to invite discussion of these significant questions for schools, and for libraries specifically.  Feel free to share your thoughts. Barbara Kurshan–from Curriki– Linear versus random knowledge.  We learned in a linear fashion, page 1-60.  Our students are accustomed to a more random learning pattern–seeking what they need to know. This is a […]

In “perpetual beta”

In her presentation at NECC on information fluency, Joyce Valenza  described how she sees herself as “version 1.8,” in perpetual beta, because she is always learning. What a great way to project to your students and staff that you are always in the process of “upgrading” and exploring new things. She pointed out that students often settle for a “good enough/why bother” point of view when it comes to searching and using information, and that both teachers and librarians need to “own” this problem, and ask more […]

Teaching that leaves a mark

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 […]

Uncharted territory

School ended on Saturday(a makeup ice day)though I am working for a couple more weeks, teaching workshops, etc.    So I’ve been a bit quiet due to the rush of end of school, library, and family events, but also just needing some time to back off and reflect. There’s a lot to process about the last year, and about my own exploration and sharing of web 2.0 tools.  As Christian Long depicts it, (thanks for the image!) we’ve gotten on the School 2.0 flight.  Only thing is, […]

Saying “yes”

Will Richardson talked about friction points caused by new technologies and the rapid pace of change.   When I heard Lawrence Lessig talk at U.T. about copyright, he was talking about how innovators created this new system of copyright because the law wasn’t changing fast enough to meet the web 2.0 environment. As I sat there listening to Lawrence Lessig in the auditorium at U.T., I noticed how many students in the audience had their laptops open, listening, taking notes, but also browsing, chatting,  and checking email, and […]

Of finding our passion

 I got the opportunity to hear Erin Gruwell (of Freedom Writers fame) speak recently and was moved by what her passion inspired in her students. I heard Will Richardson talk about the importance of helping students find their passion. And today, I read this simple and eloquent advice on finding our own and living it each day. (Much thanks to Scott McLeod at Dangerously Irrelevant for recommending the Ed Tech Journeys blog, where “learning is a journey of the mind, the body, and the heart.”)

Do our students know how we learn?

A lot of thoughts were raised during Will Richardson’s presentations yesterday, but a few that stick with me– Do our students know how we learn?   and who is in our learning network?  who do we connect to? On one blog he mentioned,  Blog of Proximal Development, Konrad Glogowski had a discussion recently of that very topic.  He encourages us to ‘step out of content’ and show that we are learners, too, because that is a way to ignite passion in our students. Will also asked who […]