Check out this online conference!!!

Begins Monday 28th May

Hi Everyone,
We are very excited to announce that the Online Conference is just about set and ready to roll. By the time you have cleaned your teeth in the morning, the last few presentations will hopefully have been polished and linked to go. So keep your eye on the clock tomorrow, get those buses away on time after school, grab that cup of coffee and head for http://time4online.org.nz

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach has three presentations already awaiting the midnight bell so make that area a great place to start. If your broadband speed is a bit slow, turn your sound off or make a cuppa while it loads, and then drag the play track back to the beginning, turn the sound back on and let it roll. Better still, set up the data projector and watch it with a group of friends, your staff or teachers from the cluster. The forum then awaits your questions and thoughts.

Collaborative learning and the cauldron of blogs and wikis also begins this Monday. Find out all about the why, the how and the effective use for yourself and your class. By the end of this week, anyone who is anyone will have a class blog or wiki or both - so easy and so useful to your class programme. Make the links between home and school. Join the 21st century.

Busy tomorrow afternoon - don’t panic. This conference concludes on June 8th, but continues forever too. This material will be available to play later and revisit to use in your workshops or staff discussions. Presentation dates are merely release dates - the times when we hope to have everything ready to roll.

Come along. Tell your friends. Use the relevant tutorials with your students. Make this the best free online conference you have ever attended, and the first of many.

Announcing the second annual “K12 Online” conference for teachers,administrators and educators around the world interested in the use ofWeb 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice! This year’sconference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, October 15-19 andOctober 22-26 of 2007, and will include a preconference keynote duringthe week of October 8. This years conference theme is “Playing withBoundaries.” A call for proposals is below.

OVERVIEW:
There will be four “conference strands”– two each week. Twopresentations will be published in each strand each day, Monday -Friday, so four new presentations will be available each day over thecourse of the two-weeks. Each presentation will be given in any of avariety of downloadable, web based formats and released via theconference blog (www.k12onlineconference.org) and archived for posterity.

FOUR STRANDS:
Week 1
Strand A: Classroom 2.0
Leveraging the power of free online tools in an open, collaborative andtransparent atmosphere characterises teaching and learning in the 21stcentury. Teachers and students are contributing to the growing globalknowledge commons by publishing their work online. By sharing allstages of their learning students are beginning to appreciate the valueof life long learning that inheres in work that is in “perpetual beta.”This strand will explore how teachers and students are playing with theboundaries between instructors, learners and classrooms. Presentationswill also explore the practical pedagogical uses of online social tools(Web 2.0) giving concrete examples of how teachers are using the toolsin their classes.

Strand B: New Tools
Focusing on free tools, what are the “nuts and bolts” of usingspecific new social media and collaborative tools for learning? Thisstrand includes two parts. Basic training is “how to” information ontool use in an educational setting, especially for newcomers. Advancedtraining is for teachers interested in new tools for learning, lookingfor advanced technology training, seeking ideas for mashing toolstogether, and interested in web 2.0 assessment tools. As educators andstudents of all ages push the boundaries of learning, what are thespecific steps for using new tools most effectively? Where “Classroom2.0″ presentations will focus on instructional uses and examples of web2.0 tool use, “New Tools” presentations should focus on “nuts andbolts” instructions for using tools. Five “basic” and five “advanced”presentations will be included in this strand.

Week 2
Strand A: Professional Learning Networks
Research says that professional development is most effective whenit aims to create professional learning communities ??? places whereteachers learn and work together. Using Web 2.0 tools educators cannetwork with others around the globe extending traditional boundariesof ongoing, learner centered professional development and support.Presentations in this strand will include tips, ideas and resources onhow to orchestrate your own professional development online; concreteexamples of how the tools that support Professional LearningEnvironments (PLEs) are being used; how to create a supportive,reflective virtual learning community around school-based goals, andtrends toward teacher directed personal learning environments.

Strand B: Obstacles to Opportunities
Boundaries formalized by education in the ???industrial age???shouldn???t hinder educators as they seek to reform and transform theirclassroom practice. Playing with boundaries in the areas of copyright,digital discipline and ethics (e.g. cyberbullying), collaboratingglobally (e.g. cultural differences, synchronous communication),resistance to change (e.g. administration, teachers, students), schoolculture (e.g. high stakes testing), time (e.g. in curriculum, teacherday), lack of access to tools/computers, filtering, parental/districtconcerns for online safety, control (e.g. teacher control of studentbehavior/learning), solutions for IT collaboration and more –unearthing opportunities from the obstacles rooted in those boundaries– is the focus of presentations in this strand.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS:
This call encourages all, experienced and novice, to submit proposals to present at this conference via this link.Take this opportunity to share your successes, strategies, and tips in???playing with boundaries??? in one of the four strands as describedabove.

Deadline for proposal submissions is June 18, 2007. You will be contacted no later than June 30, 2007 regarding your status.

Presentations may be delivered in any web-based medium that isdownloadable (including but not limited to podcasts, screencasts, slideshows) and is due one week prior to the date it is published.

Please note that all presentations will be licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.

As you draft your proposal, you may wish to consider the presentation topics listed below which were suggested in the comments on the K-12 Online Conference Blog:

* ?? special needs education
* ?? Creative Commons
* ?? Second Life
* ?? podcasting
* ?? iPods
* ?? video games in education
* ?? specific ideas, tips, mini lessons centered on pedagogical use of web 2.0 tools
* ?? overcoming institutional inertia and resistance
* ?? aligning Web 2.0 and other projects to national standards
* ?? getting your message across
* ?? how web 2.0 can assist those with disabilities
* ?? ePortfolios
* ?? classroom 2.0 activities at the elementary level
* ?? creating video for TeacherTube and YouTube
* ?? google docs
* ?? teacher/peer collaboration

KEYNOTES:
The first presentation in each strand will kick off with a keynoteby a well known educator who is distinguished and knowledgeable in thecontext of their strand. Keynoters will be announced shortly.

CONVENERS:
This year’s conveners are:

Darren Kuropatwa is currently Department Head of Mathematics atDaniel Collegiate Institute in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He is knowninternationally for his ability to weave the use of online social toolsmeaningfully and concretely into his pedagogical practice and for”child safe” blogging practices. He has more than 20 years experiencein both formal and informal education and 13 years experience in teambuilding and leadership training. Darren has been facilitatingworkshops for educators in groups of 4 to 300 for the last 10 years.Darren’s professional blog is called A Difference (http://adifference.blogspot.com). He will convene Classroom 2.0.

Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach, a 20-year educator, has been a classroomteacher, charter school principal, district administrator, and digitallearning consultant. She currently serves as an adjunct faculty memberteaching graduate and undergraduate preservice teachers at The Collegeof William and Mary (Virginia, USA), where she is also completing herdoctorate in educational planning, policy and leadership. In addition,Sheryl is co-leading a statewide 21st Century Skills initiative in thestate of Alabama, funded by a major grant from the Microsoft Partnersin Learning program. Sheryl blogs at (http://21stcenturylearning.typepad.com/blog/). She will convene Preconference Discussions and Personal Learning Networks.

Wesley Fryer is an educator, author, digital storyteller andchange agent. With respect to school change, he describes himself as a”catalyst for creative educational engagement.” His blog, ???Moving atthe Speed of Creativity??? was selected as the 2006 ???Best Learning TheoryBlog??? by eSchoolnews and Discovery Education. He is the Director ofEducation Advocacy (PK-20) for AT&T in the state of Oklahoma. Wesblogs at (http://www.speedofcreativity.org). Wes will convene New Tools.

Lani Ritter Hall currently contracts as an instructionaldesigner for online professional development for Ohio teachers andonline student courses with eTech Ohio. She is a National BoardCertified Teacher who served in many capacities during her 35 years asa classroom and resource teacher in Ohio and Canada. Lani blogs at (http://possibilitiesabound.blogspot.com). Lani will convene Obstacles to Opportunities.

QUESTIONS?
If you have any questions about any part of this, email one of us:

* ?? Darren Kuropatwa: dkuropatwa {at} gmail {dot} com
* ?? Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach: snbeach {at} cox {dot} net
* ?? Lani Ritter Hall: lanihall {at} alltel {dot} net
* ?? Wesley Fryer: wesfryer {at} pobox {dot} com

Please duplicate this post and distribute it far and wide across theblogosphere. Feel free to republish it on your own blog (actually, we’dreally like people to do that ) or link back to this post(published simultaneously on all our blogs).

Conference Tag: K12online07

Check out this site! It has a heap of graphic organizers, all sorted by the use they can be put to.

This article from the Sydney Morning Herald (copied here in full) makes some interesting points:

SCHOOL students who have good teachers take half as long to learn their course material as those with poor teachers, new research shows.

The report provides the first objective evidence of which teachers are adding value to the academic performance of their students - and which teachers are letting children down.

“The top 10 per cent of teachers achieve in half a year what the bottom 10 per cent achieve in a full year,” says the author, economist Andrew Leigh, of the Australian National University.

Dr Leigh tracked three years of numeracy and literacy exam scores for 90,000 primary school students and matched them against 10,000 teachers.

Good teaching - measured by improvements in exam scores - has almost no relationship with teacher experience, qualifications or any of the criteria currently used by most schools to hire or reward teachers.

Instead, the best teachers appear to be good at their jobs because of innate factors like personal drive, curiosity and ability to relate to students.

“Most of the differences between teachers are due to factors not captured on the payroll database,” said Dr Leigh.

The study shows female teachers are more likely to improve student literacy, while males are better at teaching maths.

Surprisingly, it shows students in large classes performed better than those in small ones - although it doesn’t claim a causative link. It also finds no positive effects of teacher qualifications on test scores, a finding which challenges the Federal Opposition’s policy of paying teachers more for better academic qualifications rather than for observed ability.

The study is likely to receive a frosty reception from teacher unions and state education bureaucracies which say exam scores cannot be used to measure teacher quality. But it has been seized upon by private schools and the Federal Government.

The executive director of the Association of Independent Schools of NSW, Geoff Newcombe, said Dr Leigh’s “groundbreaking” findings paved the way for teachers to be partly rewarded by the exam score improvements of their students. “It’s complex but we can’t stick our head in the sand and say it’s too hard,” he said.

The Federal Education Minister, Julie Bishop, said the report supports her policy of introducing performance pay for teachers next year. “This makes a mockery of education union and Labor Party claims that teacher performance cannot be measured,” she said.

The schools data for Dr Leigh’s study, which includes year 3 and 5 numeracy and literacy exam scores and information about individual teachers, was provided by the Queensland Education Department after NSW and Victoria had refused to make their information available.

As well as being used to identify, reward and retain the best teachers, Dr Leigh says his methodology could be used to send the best teachers where they could contribute most.

If indigenous students had teachers from the top quarter rather than the bottom, then the findings imply the two-year black-white test score gap could be closed within seven years.

My issue would also be with test scores being used as the sole measure of teacher quality - maybe John Key and Catherine Rich would disagree with me here in NZ though!?
I do think the mention of relationships with kids is significant though as this seems to me to be a very critical part of teacher quality and effectiveness. Relationships and engagement are two things that keep coming up as key components for children to learn to their potential adn succeed at school - what a surprise!?

Love this from Newly inducted ICP President, David Tuck during his recent address to the International Confederation of Principals conference in Auckland:

???Colleagues, we have a veritable plethora of initiatives. We have: an overabundance, a glut, a surfeit, an excess, an embarrassment of initiatives.

I don???t know what the collective noun for initiatives is, but in this instance I would like to suggest it might be a ???lunacy of initiatives???.

Many of these initiatives are very laudable, but with the best will in the world, it has to be said that some of these initiatives are doomed to failure, through lack of time, resources, capacity and just plain energy.

I firmly believe that our present plethora of initiatives has been created not necessarily for the good of the child, but for the greater glorification of politicians of all parties and jobbing bureaucrats. All of them are ego tripping with children???s life chances, disregarding pupils??? futures, in their unashamed quest for the holy grail of a novel sound-bite.

I am convinced we have an education system built on press cuttings. We have not got an education system built on well researched, trialled, properly funded and measured policies.???

particularly the last sentence …. recent experience I have had would seem to bear this out?….

great video on bullying:

I like the interface for this even if:
it is depressing in terms of what it shows I am getting
I have to use Safari because Firefox won’t load it
see what it says for you

I am having more and more of an issue with Marc Prenskys concept of digital natives. How can people of a certain age have an innate digital ability any more than all black men are good at basketball, white men can’t dance, or Polynesians are good at rugby.
Hmmmmmm!!!
I am certainly more of a digital native than many in the ‘group’ who may run two or more cell phones but that is pretty much it. Your thoughts??

A group of Japanese researchers in the Internet2 consortium have set a new record for sending data over the Internet getting it up to a rate of 9.08Gbps with the help of tweaked-out protocols. PRON fans were eagerly awaiting the news outside and the cheers could be heard from miles away.

The previous record of 7.67Gbps was set in December of last year. The data was sent across a 20,000-mile course. Do you know what this means, folks? HD movies can be downloaded in a matter of seconds. Not hours. Not minutes. Seconds. Torrenters, you have been put on notice.

source

So with Moores Law and all that is this what we have to look forward to …… COOL. We really don’t know what this will mean for the future do we!?