BLC09 - Bob Pearlman

It was great to hear Bob Pearlman, director of strategic planning for the New Technology Foundation in Tucson, Arizona. New Tech high schools are revolutionary in the way they are designed and the way the way the school day is organized. Students participate in project-based learning, create e-Portfolios, and manage their own learning and personal development.
You can read more about these schools by going to Bob's website. You will find video clips depicting these schools.

BLC09 - Howie DiBlasi

I attended a workshop presented by Howie DiBlasi. He talked about the need for schools to change to meet the needs of the 21st century learner. There were so many ideas that Howie presented to us. His websites are chock full of resources and will take time to go through.

Here are his websites:
Howie DiBlasi and Tools for the Classroom

BLC09 Benjamin Zander

I feel both energized and overwhelmed after attending Alan November's "Building Learning Communities" conference in Boston last week. So many wonderful ideas were shared, so many possibilities, yet I feel the need to step back from all of this and give myself time to process.

It was a wonderful conference that featured the top names in educational technology as presenters. Alan also brought in many interesting keynote speakers as, one of which was Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. His speech was about possibilities. It was one of the most motivating speeches I have ever heard. Who would ever imagine that one could sing "Happy Birthday" with passion, yet that's what we all did!

Benjamin compared his experiences with coaching an orchestra to teaching. He spoke of education as the opening up of new categories, not the transformation of information.

Benjamin talked about thinking outside the box - seeing the possibilities. He used the 9 dots example to demonstrate this. If you're not familiar with this, go to this website. If you are having difficulty solving the problem, you might want to ask yourself: What assumptions am I making that I don’t know I’m making?

Benjamin relishes in making mistakes. As a matter of fact, he celebrates each one by enthusiastically saying, "How fascinating". He sees mistakes as learning opportunities.

It was a wonderful 2 hours. Benjamin left us with his thoughts on how you should lead your life. He asked us to remember:
• Life is all invented.
• There's a world of possibilities.
• Rule #6 (Don’t take yourself too seriously.)

If you'd like to listen to Benjamin speak, there's a 20 minute presentation you can view at Ted Talks. It's worth watching and is sure to leave you feeling energized!

Voki

Voki is a site where you can create a character and record your voice. It's an interesting way to deliver a message or to create a scenerio. This is the speaking character I created to deliver a message for week 5 of our summer 09 Moodle course. Click on the play button to listen.

NECC 2009 - Library of Congress - PD for Teachers

I attended a presentation by representatives from the Library of Congress. As you know, the Library of Congress has wonderful learning resources for teachers and students. What you might not be aware of is their newly designed professional development website for teachers. You can go to the Library of Congress link to learn more. Select teachers from the sidebar, and then select professional development. Click on TPS Direct (Teaching with Primary Sources) to gain access to their PD site. You have the option of putting together your own professional development plan or you can select from a list of self-directed modules. There are several modules. Some examples are "how to use the Library of Congress, one on how to analyze primary sources, another on understanding the inquiry process. There are 10 pieces of content totaling 12 1/2 hours of PD. However, you can select as many hours as you'd like and the modules that you'd like to study. There are PDF files of lessons and activities that are downloadable and the best part about this is it's free! They plan on collaborating with an online PD organization and their goal is to be able to upload some of these resources to Moodle. They also plan to add 10 more content pieces.

Be sure to visit the Library of Congress website to check out this newly designed PD opportunity. You might also want to peruse their website. It's chock full of wonderful resources.

NECC 2009 - Jamie Mckenzie Presentation

I had the opportunity to attend the NECC 2009 conference in Washington D.C. at the end of June. In each of these posts, I would like to share one of the sessions or share something I found interesting. In this first post, I will share some of the points that Jamie Mckenzie made in his session: "Beyond Mere Gathering: Converting Social Networking into Collaboration and Synergy". You can go to his website to view his thoughts.

One of his key points was the importance of synthesis and the need to train people on how to synthesize. He spoke about Edward De Bono's "six colored hats". It's a great model for thinking. Jamie mentioned that we are great at "vertical thinking", but most of us need to become better at "lateral thinking". That's the intentional wondering, how we find another way of doing something. He highlighted this by using a visual thesaurus. You can type in a word and get synonyms for it. Click on a synonym and it takes you to other synonyms. It branches out in many interesting ways. There is a fee to subscribe to this program, but it is quite powerful in developing this kind of "later thinking". I would imagine it would be a powerful tool to use when studying content in any subject area.

There was reference to allowing some trial experiences of social networking. Microsoft is trying something that mimics Facebook, but in a safer environment. It's called "Sharepoint". It might be worth taking a look at this to see if it could be used in our schools.