As with my previous posts from NECC, please forgive typos, grammar, etc. These are notes from the sessions and are not intended for anything other than information. My plan is to come back, later, and “clean them up” and provide clarification, but who knows when I’ll find time for that!

Enjoy!

Presenters:

Will Richardson (http://weblogg-ed.com/)(@willrich45)
Cheryl Nussbaum-Beach
21st Century Learning – Here Comes Learning – check out Wiki

How learning looks different today

Important to be Learners, not teachers, first

YouTube video – Help with Bow drill set – example – Richardson
-Wasn’t afraid to not know something
-Showed what he did know and then asked for help – made it easy to teach him
-Didn’t ask teachers/parents – went to Web 2.0 forlearning
-Asked for feedback – plz, plz, plz – b/c it’s on YouTube there’s a large number of people who can help him
-Very comfortable with technology
-No name, no face – privacy
-How did he know he would get a response? Intriguing question
-Learning environments are changing

Connecting and Community – Cheryl
-New teachers – afraid to ask questions within their schools – fear of it being evaluative
-set up virtual community for PLN – Cheryl set up online mentors – ENDAPT – for new teachers
-found mentors did not lead the learning – everyone taught each other – virtual community of practice
-can learn and grow without feeling like they are being judged

-21st Century Learners Project — http://abpc21.org
-funded through grants (P21?)
-21st Century Learner’s Goals
-insight from project “necessity for change” – professional development needs to be centered around managing change

Richardson
-can’t look at classrooms the same way as we have in the past
-”Here Comes Everybody” – book recommendation
-Importance of forming groups – techtonic shift
-we are not fully aware of what is occurring right now – Iran and Twitter is example – can no longer be traditional journalist
-”Smart Moms” – another good book recommendation
-Connect around the tools
-Orbitz response to twitter complaint – called him!
-NCTE – Definition of 21st Century Literacies – much more complex today
-We form groups around what we write(Wikipedia) and what we read(Diigo – with comments!)

-kids moving into hyper connective and hyper transparent world – foreign to us – kids ARE using these technologies
-using them to socialize – MacArthur study – must read
-connecting to people they do and do not know
-that is a GOOD thing – millions of potential teachers for our kids – doing it without us because we don’t have the same type of context for learning in this world right now
-Some kids have no adults teaching them to use technology effectively for learning
-teachers need to be learners in this context, too – they have to connect, too

Cheryl
-Education operates on deficit based model, not strength based model
-ask them – what do YOU want to accomplish, learn, etc.
-from classroom to community structure
-teachers as colearners
-connecting and collaborating – for professional development
-What works for adults – job embedded learning – like getting personal recognition
-The Medici Effect – more suggested reading
-Professional Development – team approach – with learning communities – online ones!
-Different from the workshop driven approach
-Community Definition – from Wikipedia
-Communities of Practice – Community instigator/leader – one of the top 10 jobs in the next 10 years
-need to evolve over time
-product is co-created and collaborative with opportunities for feedback and ownership
-The Scaling Framework (From Microsoft?)
-PLP Delivery Model – Powerful Learning Practice – built on professional learning teams

Case Studies
Archdioces of Philadelphia – Nancy (@ncara)
-Technology Plan
-Team approach to putting together the plan – used online tools, too, (Twitter, Delicious, Ning)
-”surprised to find a social network could turn in to a professional network”

One to One program – Professional development for it
-Using PLP professional development worked better

Back to Will
-It’s all about being able to build a fire – figure out how to get your questions answered by being a global learner
-expansive and personalized
-Revolution isn’t online learning, it’s personalized learning
-Be Learners first, teachers second

It still blows my mind that the writing over at Students 2.0 is done by students. They have some pretty hard hitting and at times controversial things to say, but they do say it very well. Check out Innovate or Die.

This is quite a key-note address! A 12 year old student from Dallas asking over 20,000 educators, “Do you believe in me?”

Thanks to Jim Gates over at TipLine for pointing it out.

I know that you are all slammed with the start of the school year, but if you have a few minutes to spare, this one is really worth your time! What an incredibly impressive young man!

Do You Believe In Me?

I had heard this statement before. The first time was at the JMU’s Content Teaching Academy where I had the opportunity to learn from some really wonderful fellow educators and technologists. I’ve read about it, or versions of it, in many of the Edublogs I follow. I heard it again today, during David Warlick’s session at the District’s Closing the Gap Summit. Every time I hear or read about it, it really hits home for me. This is the reason why educators do what we do — we strive to prepare our students for the today’s world and the future that lies ahead of them. However, it is more important than ever before in the history of education that we prepare our students for their tomorrows without resorting to yesterday’s methods.

So, what was so wrong with our yesterdays? Absolutely nothing, really.

I can still remember Monday nights when my family gathered around the TV to watch one of the four channels available, physically getting up to change the channels. Luckily, we all liked MASH so there wasn’t much arguing over what to watch, although we did argue over who would do the channel changing.

But for our students today, this scenario is completely foreign. It is not their reality nor is it their future.

Why is this a problem? It’s a problem because all too often we find ourselves teaching the way we were taught. It’s what we know and understand best. But yesterday’s teaching does not match our students’ reality any more than the scenario above does.

Let’s imagine we have mastered teaching in today’s world, employing current methodologies that are relevant and meaningful for our students. Even given that, how can we possibly prepare our students to succeed in a world that is changing so rapidly? In his presentation Warlick stated, “For the first time in history our job as educators is to prepare our children for a future we cannot clearly describe.”

OK….so we are supposed to teach using new methodologies to prepare our students for a future about which we have absolutely no clue….feeling overwhelmed, yet?

While this is a totally understandable feeling (and one that isn’t all that unfamiliar to most of us in education), I hope that at the same time you are also feeling excitement regarding the potential there is in today’s classrooms for some truly amazing learning experiences. The Flat Classroom Project, where students from different parts of the globe collaborated on projects together, is a great example of 21st Century learning. More than ever before, learning is no longer restricted to what happens within the classroom’s four walls. Teachers today have the opportunity to increasingly become facilitators of learning rather than distributors of knowledge. In the 21st century classroom, our students have the opportunity to become active participants in the learning process rather than passive consumers.

So while feeling overwhelmed is understandable, please don’t let it extinguish the excitement you may feel about the wonderful possibilities there are in today’s classrooms.

For those of you who were unable to attend Warlick’s session, it was awesome! Here are some his resource links.

http://davidwarlick.com/wordpress/?p=254

http://davidwarlick.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OSOWSessionOutline

http://davidwarlick.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OurStudentsOurWorlds

Would it surprise you to know that the dropout rate among new teachers is higher than the average dropout rate of students over the same four-year period? And the biggest reason why is NOT poor salaries. Check out Pete O’Reilly’s post from The Pulse.

For Feel Good Friday, here is a nice video done by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. In it they remind us that life, and especially one’s education, is not a just a means to an end, but rather something to experience and treasure.

Life and Music

I hope all of you are able to take some time to sing and dance!

There’s an online conference that started today called the K12 Online Conference 2007. It’s peaked my interest so I thought I’d share.

I’m currently watching the pre-conference keynote presentation by David Warlick. Many of the other presenters author blogs you’ll find listed in my blogroll (at right).

The entire conference is totally free and totally online. So watch and read at your convenience!