A Piece of My Mind

Photo Credit: Me.

Once again, we had another fabulous day in Texarkana ISD. Today we spent time discussing blogs with the elementary teachers. It looks as if this district is going to light up with WWW with elementary bloggers in the very near future. I look forward to having the kids in White Oak collaborating with the students here.

Below you will find the list of resources we discussed. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comment section.

Blogging as a Class Resources

Step by step directions for setting up an Edublogs Blog

Tips on Blogging with Students

Room 202’s Blogging Contract

Advice on Student Blogging

Acceptable Use Agreement – Digital Citizenship

Room 229’s Blogging Contract (5th Grade)

Learning to Blog the Elementary Way (includes blogging permission slip)

Blogging is Elementary

Elementary Blog Policy

Pam Cranford’s Class Blog

Any Soldier (site mentioned to find soldiers to communicate with)

Edublogs

Thank you, Texarkana ISD, for such a warm reception at your back to school, instructional technology-themed conference today. It was so nice to have a welcoming environment when I know how hard it is to listen to someone talk to you for 90 minutes to start the day. Hopefully, I was able to get you motivated for the kiddos who will be filling the halls and rooms next week.

As I mentioned in my talk, I am listing the links to the videos and sites we talked about during both the keynote and my breakout sessions. If you have any questions or I left something off, please leave a comment and I will add it in or get back with you about your questions. I look forward to working with your district again in the future. Good luck in the coming school year!

Keynote – “Instructional Technology: Who’s driving?”
Breakout Session – “Social Networking: It’s not just for kids anymore”

My Introduction video

Introducing the Book video

Joe’s Non-netbook video

PS22 Choir “Landslide” video

Kaplan “Chairs” video

A Brave New World video

RSS in Plain English video

National Technology Standards:

• Students
• Teachers
• Administrators

Star Chart info

Dr. Helen Barrett’s ePortfolio work

White Oak ISD’s ePortfolio & blog site

Voicethread site (book review samples)

Animoto

My son’s pirate story

2nd Grade teacher’s (Emily Richeson) blog

iTunes U

Edublogs (education only blogs)

Scott’s Delicious account (bookmarking)

Google Reader

Google Apps (Docs, Spreadsheet, Calendar, Presentation, Forms)

Twitter (Scott’s site)

Ten Tips for Growing Your Learning Network

Dean and Alec plan it out.  Photo courtesy: techleslie

While I should have gotten to this a month or more ago, I am just now finally having the opportunity to review the evaluations returned at the end of our Area 7 TCEA Technology Conference held in White Oak ISD in June. Feel free to ignore this post, but I would appreciate any feedback you can give to allow us to improve it next year. Whether you were a virtual attendee or in person, your feedback will help us out.

First of all, let me thank the line-up of top notch presenters that gave of their time to help me out:

Dean Shareski – Keynote Speaker

Alec Couros – Keynote Speaker

Jennifer Wagner 

Maria Henderson

Diana Benner

Christine Voigt

Paul R. Wood

Joan Gore

Janet Corder

Pam Cranford

Randy Rogers

Corina Long

Mark Cockrell

Stuart Burt

John Maklary

Gerri Maglia & Jay Olson (TETN and ESC7)

David Phillips

John Simpson (PASCO)

Nina Peery

I think that is everyone, but if I missed you, please let me know. Each of you folks have a place in my heart for what you did for us that day. Giving of your time to prepare and present was absolutely awesome. If I can return the favor, please let me know. I will do whatever I can to repay each you.

As for the survey, I am happy with the return rate of the post event evaluations. It was right around the 50% mark, so I feel like I got some good feedback. I only had one attendee who was obviously forced to attend, but I included that response anyway.

The only written feedback that came with the only dissatisfied attendee was “Hands on step by step learning”. My assumption is that he/she thought it was a workshop instead of a conference. But when you throw in the several other satisfied attendees that asked for more hands-on content, it lets me know that it might be a good idea to see if I have any presenters willing to offer longer sessions that could become mini workshops to allow more hands on. We did offer three labs of hands-on sessions along with open wireless throughout the buildings, so there were opportunities to become more hands on if you just wanted to.

Looking at the other data, I found that the vast majority heard about the event from emails circulating with some word of mouth thrown in. The TCEA website only directed one person to the event. While the TCEA site was going through a major overhaul at the time, items could have been posted quicker and easier to see since they were submitted months before. The good news is that it looks as though board members will be able to add their own content (if you use IE), and that will allow for a smoother process. Maybe this will help next year.

We had the standard “rooms were too cold” complaints, but that is always a difficult one to overcome. While I felt the building was a bit too cold in the morning, it leveled out as expected as the afternoon rolled around.

I did have a few who wanted cookies and Dr. Pepper provided even though there were only positive comments on the BBQ lunch. It was good.  We did have coolers throughout the buildings all day with free water, Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, Mountain Dew, Sunny D, and more. I will try to remember the DP next time.

Everyone loves them some Randy Rogers. Photo courtesy: Dean Shareski

Upon reflection, I feel like I could have improved in a number of areas:

 - Gather more volunteers. I did this intentionally this year because I wanted to take the fall personally if things did not work out. Next year, I will find others to go down with me. Not really. I will find some giving folks to help facilitate sessions and check folks in to speed up the processes. It would not hurt to have a few folks stuff bags ahead of time as well. I had several great ladies in the admin office help out, but it is always faster with more folks.  Otherwise, the administration part went well.
 - Train volunteers. I want the facilitators to be able to start the UStream recording sessions for the presenters. Only one person (a first time presenter) did not want to be streamed. Everyone else did not mind. I would just like to have someone in place to hit record so we have the archive for everyone to refer back to.
 - Have a better PA system in place for keynotes. While I only had one complaint, we need to put a better system in that area that allows for multiple wireless lapels. No tech presenter in his/her right mind is going to stand behind a podium while presenting the entire time. Then, you throw in the Cool Tools Duel and you have the need for multiple mics. This would also help with the UStream of the keynote as well.
 - Continue to invite the virtual world in. We had what I thought was a tremendous presence of virtual attendees.  I was only able to follow the sessions from my iPhone (Twitter) due to me being everywhere at once, but the response seemed very positive. The interaction was off the charts of anything I expected. Having the Twitter board running over the gathering area was a really cool deal. I appreciate Master Audio Visual for supplying the screen and projector. It worked very well. We wanted to leave it because it looked so cool, but the campus admin shot us down on the idea. Something about middle school kids, pencils, markers, yada, yada, yada.
 - The conference Moodle was a great tool. I need to better prepare it next year. I would like to give the vendors a little more coverage on it if they would like. I had them in two places with links, but I want them to embed content to make it better for them and the attendees. I also feel like the way I linked the rooms to the UStreams worked well. If the virtual attendees downloaded the conference program, they could easily match the session room number to the stream.  Leading to….
 - UStream was great. Our network, thanks to @mikegras and Suzanne Woodburn, ran like a top. Their prep work on the network kept everything running smooth as silk. We had as many as 15 streams running at one time along with all of the presenter traffic, attendee traffic, and a video conference stream with no hiccups. Very nice. Thanks to you both (along with Cheryl Hawthorne who ran around stomping our any fires that came up).
 - The MacBook is a VERY powerful little tool. Why anyone would hate on the Macs is beyond me. I received tons of emails and Twitter messages after the event asking me what mics and cameras we used because the quality was so good via UStream. Well, we used the built-in mics and webcams of the MacBook. Those little, white, plastic laptops ran like a champ all day long. It was a good testament to our staff who are/were receiving MacBooks and realized how easy it really is to share with the world what is going on in the classroom. Next year, I will ramp up the audio and video quality settings on the streams since we know the network can handle it with ease. So next year, be on the lookout for even better quality streams.
 - Judging by the Flickr photos folks posted, everyone was having a good time and learning. I appreciate the crowd sourcing of those photos. Always nice to refer back to.
 - Registering participants and presenters via Google Forms was painless and worth every penny I did not have to spend. Thanks, Google Apps for Education!
 - Do a better job of letting the campus admin know the schedule/routine for picking up equipment after the event. While those of us working the event knew we would be back the next day to pick up the laptops locked in the rooms, the campus admin did not. He got a little concerned and picked them up himself which in turn made us scramble to account for all of them. We knew which rooms had them. He did not. Next year, I will do a better job with that, including the documenting of which machine was in which room and letting him know our plans.
 - Having Two Guys from Saskatchewan was a great idea, if I do say so myself. Alec Couros and Dean Shareski did awesome jobs in every way. They even sat around at lunch continuing the conversation with my superintendent and many others. Having their outside of Texas perspective did wonders for many in attendance. They see that the problems they face are systemic, and that if we are going to improve the system, we all have to work together.  The Cool Tools Duel was a hit, to say the least. While I know it is not about the tools, we are working with a lot of teachers who are not even the least bit familiar with what they have out there. Alec and Dean did a superb job of showing a wide assortment. Who won that thing again? Oh, and catch the tool list here on Randy’s blog.
 - Jen Wagner is a lifelong friend that I have never met. This sister in Christ did everything short of hijack a plane to get involved with our event. The weather did not get her there, but her persistence and the continuing assistance of Paul R. Wood and John Maklary sure did (along with more than a dozen online tools). I never heard one negative thing about attendees having to sit in a virtual session instead of a F2F one. That is a testament to the power of the Jen. Thank you, my friend. Sweet tea and BBQ still await you (with half a Chick Fil A shake for dessert).
 - Offering VC sessions are not the most popular, but they were attended, informative, and appreciated. We had two separate presenters utilize the portable VC system we have. One showed off the online offerings of TETN (yes, I let the TETN folks present; I even called and asked them to; see, I’m a good guy…mostly). The other session showed off the online database offerings for librarians. Our library staff loved it. Hopefully, others did as well.
 - We need to rethink our VGA connections. I had no complaints from presenters on the VGA connections being in the back of the room. I offered bluetooth wireless presenters, and some brought their own. I did have a few comments from teachers in attendance, though, that said they are now rethinking why they keep their connections in the back of the room. They realized how difficult it can be on the kids to be engaged if the speaker is behind their backs. Good point. I will plan on having extensions available next year just in case, though.
 - Twitter did a great job of just being a part of the conference experience. Many used it to retweet key quotes. Some used it to announce a session starting. Still others used it just to let their friends know where they were headed. Regardless, it was well used and appreciated. And, as I mentioned, having that ginormous screen with the Twitter Camp running was too cool.
 - While I appreciate the high rate of return on the paper conference evaluations, I want to make it online as well next year. This will not only help me with collecting and disaggregating the data, but it will show another tool our teachers can be using with kids. I use Google Forms for my surveys, so it should work fine.
 - While on the topic of surveys, I should have had one for the presenters. I plan on doing that now anyway. I am sure they can recall any issues, concerns, or good things still. I want and need them to be happy. If they are not enjoying themselves, I want to fix it.
 - I only had one session with no attendees (that I heard about). I wonder if it was that I had too many sessions offered at once, since that session really was a great one for elementary teachers. We had about 13 sessions running concurrently for 200 attendees. Maybe I should back it down to about ten sessions at one time and just add another into the schedule. I need to think on that one, but please feel free to comment on it as well.
 - Having three strands was good (admin, tech director, classroom teacher). No one commented on it, but I think it made a difference in helping them find a session. I plan on doing that again.
 - Master Audio Visual helped sponsor some of the travel to get the Canadians into Texas while Visual Techniques provided the very large screen they had behind them, which was cool. Both vendors are very supportive of what we are trying to doing in White Oak. We truly appreciate that.
 - When you order BBQ for 200 folks, send a full size cargo van or two SUVs to pick it all up. Thanks to Melanie and Cheryl, it all arrived safely…in multiple trips. Sorry. It was much appreciated, to say the least. While on the topic of food, I need to get the cafeteria to make cookies next time. They are awesome, and a few folks missed out on having them. They’ll be there next time.

Michael Gras and I spent the better part of the Thursday before the conference smoking ribs, brisket, veggie kabobs (thank you to @CClong’s hubbie for grilling those bad boys), hamburgers, and more. We wanted our out of town presenters to feel at home their first night in the area. We all sat around the pool at the hotel breaking bread and reflecting on why we do what we do in education. It was an honor to be in the presence of those folks. I could not have paid enough money to gather that much talent. Yet, they did not come for the money. They came for the love of making things better in public education. You have to love that. It is why I am proud to call them all part of my PLN. I only wish more people could have enjoyed the time with us.

Speaking of which, if you missed out on presenting this year and are interested in helping us out next year, put June 11, 2010, on your calendar and email me (floyds at woisd dot net) about it. The smokers will be fired up once again, the golf courses will be beckoning, and the Gladewater Rodeo will be going on. We had a great time there as well. Then, you throw in what turned out to be a heck of a little area tech conference, and you should thoroughly enjoy yourself. Please consider it.
 
And for the one person who said we needed better door prizes, I’m not sure how to improve on iPods (including Touch), digital cameras, iTunes gift cards, an IWB, free conference registrations (TCEA and Bishop Dunne’s GeoTech Conference), complete curriculum kits for GIS, and more that I know I am forgetting. It was not a state level conference, but I thought we did a decent job with all of those prizes. Anyone is welcome to fill me in in the comment section below as to what else might be preferred. Other than a Plasma, that is. And remember, the registration was only $25 and we offered free breakfast snacks, lunch, and CPE credits for the day.

My final reflection concerns an award I received Monday night. White Oak ISD’s highest award they present is called the Roughneck Award. It is given to those who go above and beyond the call of duty. My superintendent presented it to me at a school board meeting. His presentation speech meant a lot for me to hear. He discussed my spending time on campuses instead of just in my office. He talked about my work on the district website, adding Twitter as a communication and collaboration tool, and building a program for electronic portfolios and blogs district-wide for staff and students. But the part that will stick with me was about this conference. He was bragging about the turnout and the quality of the sessions and presenters and the organization of it. Then he added one thing. He said that none of it would have been possible without the PLN that I have been able to develop using tools like Twitter and blogs. He said that being able to wrangle in that much talent with only the promise of BBQ and golf was a feat, but he felt those people came because of the relationship and level of respect they had with me instead. That was the take home line for me. He is right. If it were not for a bunch of free tools and encouragement by those I have met virtually, none of that would have happened and 200 educators would have missed out on a really awesome collection of knowledge. While receiving the award was definitely appreciated, having such good friends and bosses makes all the work worth it. Funny, it rarely seems like work these days.

Jen Wagner contemplating virtually calling time violations on Dean and Alec during the Cool Tools Duel Photo courtesy: techleslie

____________________________________________
Survey Results
____________________________________________
97 total responses (about a 50% return rate)

How did you learn about the conference?
68 – Email Announcement
27 – Word of Mouth
1 – TCEA Website
1 – no response

Overall, how satisfied were you with the conference?
67 – Very Satisfied
27 – Satisfied
1 – Dissatisfied

Overall, how satisfied were you with the technology (wireless access, conference Moodle, UStream sessions, Twitter, etc) available to you?
55 – Very Satisfied
41 – Satisfied
1 – Dissatisfied

Overall, how satisfied were you with the sessions offered?
58 – Very Satisfied
38 – Satisfied
1 – Dissatisfied

Do you plan on attending this conference next year?
77 – Yes
0 – No
20 – Maybe

What, if anything, could be done to improve your experience as an attendee at this conference?
 - several comments asking for longer sessions
 - a few requests for handouts to be mandatory
 - several requests for more hands-on
 - +++++ Excellent
 - Loved the Macs!  The most effective sections for me were the podcasting because there was a “beginner’s” session followed by a more intensive session. This really helped me understand more than jumping in over my head.
 - More time at each session; Make it a 2 day conference
 - Wonderful day. presenters excellent, great content, Cool Tool Dudes – COOL!
 - a couple of requests for presenters to specify if they use Mac or PC (most sessions were web based, so I’m not sure why this mattered)
 - Randy Rogers was awesome! (Randy swears he did not write that on his evaluation)

Photo Credit: Me (partial Twitter followers)
There has been a lot of talk over the last few years about Personal Learning Networks (PLN). You know, the group that you put together yourself to help you learn new things about a related topic. In my case, it is educational technology and education theory in general.

My PLN is pretty diverse. It ranges from close friends that I have eaten dinner/played golf with to new friends who I have met face to face to complete strangers overseas in countries I have never been to. Then, throw in a few folks that love to play devil’s advocate regardless of the topic and you have a nice, diverse group to help you grow some dendrites. 

Recently I had the opportunity to discuss PLN’s with a good friend who works outside the education community. He related several tips to building a strong PLN, but he calls it community:

1. Have the right idea about friendship. Know that true friends are honest regardless of whether they agree or disagree.  The important thing is that you realize the importance of a friend and not just looking for a “yes man/woman.”

2.  Be sure you see the reality of the process of a community. Get the true value out of it. Only you can make the decision to do that. Make sure the person you are adding is worth the effort. Be sure to factor in that the process will have valleys as well as mountains. You can learn and grow during both.

3. You have to move beyond the superficial. In other words, who cares who your friend is or what his/her title/ranking/popularity/Tweet ranking/etc really is. That does not grow knowledge and community. Moving deeper into the relationship is what helps build trust. It puts the conversation and expectation of input at a level that you both can grow from. Challenge yourself and your PLN for that deeper content or you’re both wasting time.

Also, be who you are and not who others want you to be. Seth Godin has a great, short piece on Walter Cronkite:

Here’s the thing about the life of Walter Cronkite:
At every turn, he acted as if he had a responsibility to his audience. He didn’t do the right thing because he thought it would help him get ahead and then one day he’d get his share. Instead, he always did the right thing because that’s who he was. No sellouts, no political consulting, no false transparency.
That’s the way it is.
Transparency works if it’s authentic.

So my friend’s overall key point is that the ability to experience and enjoy the friendship of the PLN you create is in direct proportion to the relationship you build. Throwing together a haphazard group just because you think you need one now is only going to disappoint both you and them.  Take your time.  Add and remove from your group. Revisit the group make-up as you go. Be honest with yourself about your own growth. Your PLN is for your benefit. You get out of it what you put into it. If you only plan to follow along and not participate, you will never expand your own learning, and others will find folks more willing to be a part of the process.

Passive learning stinks. Be an active part of the process.  Maybe this little bit of my friend’s advice will help you out.

PS: Once you realize the power of this in your own learning, imagine what it would do for your students.

Slide Credit: Dr. Helen Barrett
I have had several inquiries as to how my poster session went that was centered on using free online tools (Web 2.0) in creating, organizing, and maintaining electronic portfolios for staff and students. Well, in a word, great! I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to speak with so many others trying to do the same thing we are. While I am in a better situation than most due to a technology department and curriculum department that plays VERY well together, we still have our struggles. Training is one of them. There is so much to building effective eportfolios that one person relatively new to the concept cannot learn and regurgitate it all back to staff in a productive way.

Thankfully, someone I admire for her knowledge and ability to share and teach stepped up to my session. Dr. Helen Barrett appeared in the corner of my booth. Fortunately, I saw her arrive and noted to everyone there that she was THE one to talk to about all things eportfolios. Anything I have to share about eportfolios would pale in comparison to this wonderfully read and prepared professor.  Another awesome piece of luck was that my curriculum director walked up behind me about the same time. I put the two of them together quickly to schedule some training in our district. If/When we are lucky enough to get Dr. Barrett in White Oak, our staff and students will never be the same again. We will be fully on track to creating portable archives of learning and teaching that all should be proud of. Exporting the eportfolio from the Wordpress blog right to a flash drive will be a common happening for our students in the near future to allow them to take their representative work with them to college interviews, job interviews, competitions, etc. 

Another piece of luck came along when I ran into Sue Waters from Edublogs. After a lengthy conversation with Sue in the Blogger’s Cafe, my chief of technology and I decided it was time to move our entire WPMU blogging system to Edublogs Campus Ultimate where it will get the care and support it deserves. James Farmer, Sue Waters, and company will do more to keep up our system than we ever could. We know that this will now be the Cadillac version of our goals that we have wanted and needed all along. I have already noticed an unprecedented increase in speed in initial loading and navigating within and between blogs. Thank you, Edublogs! Our staff and students are going to be overjoyed when they log back in.

Photo Credit: AJC1 (Hartnell-Young, E. et al. (2007) Impact study of e-portfolios on learning partners.)
Another advantage for me in the move to Edublogs Campus Ultimate is the ability to batch create blogs and users. This was a headache when our system was at SiteGround because having a class or two of kids hitting the server at the same time never ended with anything but timeouts and 404 errors. It was what pushed us into seeking out a better host of our system. Considering we went from a Gig of traffic a month to over a Gig a day by the end of the year, we had to do something proactive before it all crashed down around us. You can go read for yourself all the benefits of making the move to Edublogs Campus Ultimate, but I can see this relationship being a very good one for all of us in White Oak ISD.

Stay tuned as we ramp up our electronic portfolio process with training by Dr. Helen Barrett and implementation by our staff and students this school year.

Wow. This was one of the best sessions I have attended at NECC this year. Not because there was any new solution to any problem. Not because there was actually a debate of an issue with opposing sides (there was). Not because I got to see and hear a lot of great minds all in one place (I did). I say it was the best session because it was a nice extension of the conversation we all need to have, but it was broader. We heard voices of those fearing their presence of even being in the room due to not grasping much of the concepts and terms being thrown around, yet they stepped up and voiced that opinion. We heard from those who truly wanted a line drawn between “tools” and “technology integration” from a pedagogical view. Contextual use instead of forcing a tool because it is the cool one to be using now.  That is just the beginning of the hour we had.

So here is where I am at. Pick through the content from this session and you can find dozens of strands of discussion to choose from to start your own conversation. Find the others talking about it in the backchannel and search them out on blogs or Twitter and continue it with them. They are in this conversation because they care and want to better education for our kids. They WANT to keep up the conversation. I do not know of one person in my experience of ed tech that will shut you down and not converse with you because you are new or on a different path than they are. Most want to learn from others who have different perspectives and experiences. It is what I stay in it for. Link your blog post back to here (since the trackback will show me where you are talking/writing at) and I will join in. I look forward to it.

Linked here is the backchannel of the session. Here are Wes Fryer’s notes on the session as well.  If I find the video or audio files linked somewhere I will link to those as well.

Talk on!

It’s a funny thing being a presenter. While I really work hard to make my own presentations engaging (and fail at times, I’m sure) I find myself more critical of others. Now, by critical, I mean both good and bad. I am always looking to see what makes one a better presenter over another and also what was the “thing” that released the crowd from the stream of thought so they would day dream instead.

With that in mind, several posts and conversations were had this year at NECC that I took notice of. While Scott McLeod and Doug Johnson do nice jobs of sharing their thoughts and even offering suggestions, one of the things that got my attention was a conversation had at the Google gathering with several others including Scott Meech and Dean Shareski.

Standard sessions have turned into sit and gets and have lost their luster. Poster sessions might be the better option. What makes one better than the other? The conversations. My presentation this year was changed from a standard session to a poster session. At first it was mixed feelings, but after having gone through my two hours of the poster session, it is all good. I was able to have deeper conversations with more people than if I had stood in front of an audience sharing the same information. The engagement for both me as a presenter and them as an audience was a far better experience than I have had in other settings. Dean noted that he felt it might be the better route to have the session conversations take place (as opposed to the unconference sessions conversations).

While many of us say the best PD takes place in the halls of the conference, maybe the poster session is the next best thing. Should that idea be expanded?

Now, let’s take ourselves from the position of teacher/learners at a conference and move into the position of learner in a school setting. Yeah, I would have preferred this type of setting in school as well.

necc09

Photo Credit: Me
My son told me the other day he was using an educational site his teacher (Mrs. Richeson) had bookmarked in her delicious account, and then he proceeded to recite her URL from memory and say it was easy to do. And he is 8.

Okay, so Alan Levine was kidding in his comment to the post introducing this video to me when he called them “little copyright thugs.” One has to kid about the topic after seeing the following video posted on Alec Couros’s blog. But let me say before you watch it, art and music are SOOOOOOO important for all of us to be able to express our emotions and life lessons in a format rather then keeping them pent up inside and not letting the world see how great a person each of us can be on the inside. We all have our favorite picture or song or poem that means the world to us for personal reasons. I think this teacher and many of the kids just found one of their own. 

With that being said, here are the “little copyright thugs.”

Can you see the engagement in the song that the kids had? It was not “hey we’re making a movie” or “watch me be the star of this thing.” It was a genuine expression of engagement brought out by an educator that we all hope to see in our classrooms (albeit, I never had poetry written or recited in my class with such passion as these kids shared). Oh, and the kicker is that these kids have been invited by Stevie Nicks after she saw this video on YouTube to sing it in Madison Square Gardens. Feel free to drop by the kids’ blog and let them know how great they really are: http://www.ps22chorus.blogspot.com/ Not bad for a campus where 3 out of 4 are on free/reduced lunch, huh?

Quick point here. Notice they blog. Notice that we now notice how great these kids AND their teacher both are. Enough noticing. Read on.

Now, let’s consider what Alec was getting at. This explicitily shows why we should be publishing our kids’ work. They are going to experience things because of this short 2 minute video that most of us only dream about. Why? Their teacher thought enough to show off what they can do to the world. Sure, it might all be a fluke that Stevie Nicks saw the video and invited them, but the fluke was not possible without that teacher making that concious choice to publish the work. Also, think of the lives this can touch with those kids. Already fighting their way out of a hole poverty-wise, they can now see they have value, skills, hope, and a teacher that obviously loves them very, very much. Did you catch his commentary at the end? It was three words: “That was goooooood.” I have not seen a bigger smile on any face than he had on his at that moment. Even Darren Kuropatwa zoomed in on that part of it. It just says so much.

So, let’s review here. The kids practice a Fleetwood Mac song. The teacher decides to record them singing it. The outcomes:
1. We are inspired by what these kids can do with a passion.
2. The parents obviously know their kid’s teacher loves his job and his students a TON.
3. Stevie Nicks sees the video via a social networking video site, cries, falls in love with the kids, and invites them to perform at Madison Square Gardens.
4. Ed tech guys and gals jump on the story as a way to motivate their own teachers to do such things as publishing more (any) student content.
5. The students see a new value in school and learning and that there is light at the end.
6. Teacher gets a book and movie deal and becomes Mr. Holland’s Opus II: The Modern Version (I made that up, but it could happen).

I hope Alec finds a way to weave this post and video into his time with us in White Oak on June 12th. Did I mention he is one of the keynoters and a featured presenter? Feel free to join us.

In the meantime, fire up your class blog and get your students’ work out there. The world needs to see just how good they (and you) really are.

Last year I had the honor of attending Gary Stager’s conference Constructing Modern Knowledge. It was time very well spent. If you have the time and resources to make it to his event this summer, you will not regret it. He and his presenters will make you think, discuss, experiment, and collaborate like never before. If we are lucky, NECC will invite Dr. Stager to be a part of the debate at NECC, and you will be able to get a preview of what you have ahead of you.  Here is what you need to know:

Dear Constructing Modern Knowledge Pioneer,