K12 is Online

Posted on October 23, 2006 by Bud Hunt

The K12 Online Conference kicked off this morning, my keynote included. Lots to see, write, explore and discuss. Hope to "see" you there, especially at the Fireside chat on Thursday, 5pm Mountain time.

MacArthur and A Little Cash

Posted on October 21, 2006 by Bud Hunt

I received a press release in my e-mail on Thursday night, but I ignored it until yesterday. Here ’tis:

On behalf of the MacArthur Foundation initiative
on digital
media and learning, we invite you, your colleagues, and your students
to join
us in two online forums which will run from Monday, October 23 through
Friday,
Nov. 3rd.

The MacArthur Foundation seeks to create networks
of
interested scholars and practitioners as they move toward a substantial
investment in the area of digital media and learning. Our specific
working
group is identifying consequences of digital media use that might be
unanticipated or unexpected, which we will examine in-depth in a book
of essays
to be completed next year.

We are undertaking two online discussions over the
next two
weeks. The first seeks to explore the
possibilities and limits of using digital media in the K-12 classroom
by
engaging with teachers who face such questions every day, particularly
since
this group is a significant stakeholder in the issue of digital media
and
learning. The conversation is framed
around three questions:

1. “If you were free to use digital media to teach
in any
way you wanted, how would you use it?”
2. “What currently limits your use of digital media in the classroom?”
3. “What has surprised you about you students’ digital media use?"

The second forum is designed to encourage youth to
respond
to ideas being formulated by our researchers. If possible, we’d love to hear from your students.

Responses generated through these forums will
enrich our
research and may be included in our published volume and in other
MacArthur
materials.

To join us, please go to one of our online
discussion forums
at:
For Teachers: http://community.macfound.org/openforum?go=z1082179
For Youth: http://community.macfound.org/openforum?go=z1082180
The first time you visit the site, you’ll need to create
a user name and password (simply click on “Join”); once you register,
you’ll be
directed to one of the forums.

Further background: The
John
D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recently announced plans to
build the emerging
field of digital media and learning, committing $50 million over five
years to
the effort. The Foundation will fund
research and innovative projects focused on understanding the impact of
the
widespread use of digital media on our youth and how they learn. See www.macfound.org/digital
for more information.

Please
circulate and/or blog this information as you see fit, with
apologies for any cross-postings, and don’t hesitate to contact me
should you have questions.

All best,

Tara McPherson

Editor, volume on Innovative Uses & Unexpected Consequences
Associate Professor, USC School of Cinematic Arts

Any time folks ask my students to participate in questions that might come back to directly affect them, I’m interested. The timing on these fora (or it is forums) is also perfect — they’ll be running concurrently with the K12 Online Conference. This MacArthur initiative is very, very interesting, although a bit confusing to navigate via their collection of sites and whatnot. I’m trying to understand the implications, but I don’t. Yet. (I did, however, discover this interesting Spotlight blog. Some pretty smart folks writing there, even if I don’t yet grasp why.)
Tom makes some good suggestions about aims for educators in this endeavor:

I would propose that it should be our goal to extract two things from this initiative:

That future grant cycles include some teacher-initiated projects,
with the initiative providing development and research support;

That those projects release any code written under an open source license.

He even offers to help write some software with folks. I think I’ll definitely need to pay attention to the MacArthur initiative, even though I don’t yet understand what it all means. Five years and fifty million seems, well, like there might be plenty of opportunities for good things to happen.

The Podcast: Asking Questions About the K12Online Conference

Posted on October 19, 2006 by Bud Hunt

Had a "first draft thinking" conversation with Dave Cormier yesterday about some of the side conversation/question/criticism around the K12Online Conference. Specifically, we were discussing a recent post by Stephen Downes, as well as some of our own concerns/questions/observations about the conference. Since our recording, Stephen has further elaborated on his remarks.
The goal of the conversation was to honestly hash out some of those thoughts. It’s certainly my hope that the discussion both about the conference and how to conference continues in a productive and useful manner.

And so it begins . . .

Posted on October 16, 2006 by Bud Hunt

I’m sitting here at my desk at work listening to the opening Fireside Chat of the first K12 Online Conference. I’ve never attended a live Elluminate session before — and I can simply say that I’m blown away. We’re talking to and with the world. After all the podcasts and webcasts and blogging and wikis and connections with others, I’m always struck by just how powerful and amazing these connections are.
Wow. Just wow.

One Last Call

Posted on September 27, 2006 by Bud Hunt

Will reminds you, so I don’t have to:

This is your last reminder…presentation proposals for the First Annual K12 Online Conference
are due by the end of day Saturday, so if you haven’t gotten yours in
yet, you better get cranking. As of this moment, we have 34 proposals…

Click here to submit.

TIme to Submit Those Proposals

Posted on September 13, 2006 by Bud Hunt

The proposal submission form is up over at the K12Online Conference blog. If you’re a K-12 classroom teacher, or someone who works with K-12 classroom teachers, and you’re doing something interesting with technology that’s making the classroom a better place to be for our students, we need you to share the good stuff with us. Please, please, please consider carving out some time to submit a conference proposal.
I’m so excited to have this opportunity to learn and work with you.

K12 Online Conference

Posted on September 4, 2006 by Bud Hunt

I’m pleased to report that I’ll be giving one of the keynote presentations for the first "K12 Online 2006" conference/convention/virtual meetup/really neat-o mashup of smart folks sharing interesting things. Please read the rest of this post to learn more and to see how you can participate. Thanks in advance to the conference organizers for all of the hard work they’ve done so far — and all the work left to do.

——–

Announcing the first annual “K12 Online 2006″ convention for
teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in
the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice. This
year’s conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, Oct. 23-27
and Oct. 30- Nov. 3 with the theme “Unleashing the Potential.” A call for proposals is below.

There will be four “conference strands”– two each week. Two
presentations will be published in each strand each day, Monday -
Friday, so four new presentations will be available each day over the
course of the two-weeks. Each presentation will be given in podcast or
screencast format and released via the conference blog (URL: TBA) and
archived for posterity.

THE FOUR STRANDS ARE:

Week 1

Strand A: A Week In The Classroom

These presentations will focus on the practical pedagogical uses of
online social tools (Web 2.0) giving concrete examples of how teachers
are using the tools in their classes. They will also show how teachers
plan for using these tools in the delivery of their curricular
objectives.

Strand B: Basic/Advanced Training (one of each per day)

Basic training is “how to” information on tool use in an educational setting, especially for newcomers.

Advanced training is for teachers who have already started using Web
2.0 tools in their classes and are looking for: (a) advanced technology
training (eg. how to write your own blog template or hack existing
ones), (b) new tools they can make use of in their classes, (c)
teaching ideas on how to mash tools together to create “something new,”
(d) a pedagogical understanding of how technologies such as Weblogs,
wikis, podcasts, social bookmarking sites, RSS feeds and others can
deepen learning and increase student achievement, or (e) use of
assessment tools to measure the effectiveness of Read/Write Web
technologies in their personal practice and with their students.

Week 2

Strand A: Personal Professional Development

Tips, ideas and resources on how to orchestrate your own professional
development online; the tools that support Professional Learning
Environments (PLEs); how to create opportunities to bring these
technologies to the larger school community; how to effectively
incorporate the tools into your personal or professional practice; or
how to create a supportive, reflective virtual professional community
around school-based goals.

Strand B: Overcoming Obstacles

Tips, ideas and resources on how to deal with issues like: lack of
access to tools/computers, filtering, parental/district concerns for
online safety, and other IT concerns while trying to focus on best
practice in the use of Web 2.0 tools.

CONVENORS & KEYNOTES

For organization purposes, each strand is overseen by a conference
convenor who will assist and coordinate presenters in their strand. The
first presentation in each strand will kick off with a keynote by a
well known educator who has distinguished his/herself and is
knowledgeable in the context of each topic. This year’s convenors and
keynote presenters are:

A Week In The Classroom

Convenor: Darren Kuropatwa

Keynote: Bud Hunt

Bud Hunt teaches high school language arts and
journalism at Olde Columbine High School in Longmont, Colorado. He is a
teacher-consultant with and the Tech Liaison for the Colorado State
University Writing Project, an affiliate of the National Writing
Project, a group working to improve the teaching of writing in schools
via regular and meaningful professional development. Bud is also the
co-editor of the New Voices column of English Journal, a publication of
the National Council of Teachers of English. A consumer of copious
amounts of New Media, Bud blogs and podcasts about his practice and
larger educational issues at http://www.budtheteacher.com.

Basic/Advanced Training

Convenor: Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach

Keynote: TBA

Personal Professional Development

Convenor: Will Richardson

Keynote: Ewan McIntosh

Ewan McIntosh is an educational technologist and teacher
of French and German. Based in the Edinburgh area of Scotland he
frequently works around the UK and Europe, leading student and teacher
workshops and conferences. He is an experienced workshop facilitator in
the area of Web 2.0 technologies in education across stages and
curricular areas. Ewan blogs at http://edu.blogs.com

Overcoming Obstacles

Convener: TBA

Keynote: Anne Davis

Anne is known for seeing the educational possibilities
in the use ofweblogs with students in classrooms, having implemented
wonderful ideasand weblog projects with students and teachers in K-12
classrooms and atthe university level. She currently works at Georgia
State University inthe Instructional Technology Center in the College
of Education as anInformation Systems Training Specialist. Her weblog,
EduBlog Insights

is a co-winner of the Best Teacher Blog inthe
second international Edublog Awards, a web based event thatrecognizes
the many diverse and imaginative ways in which weblogs arebeing used
within education.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

We’d like to invite you to submit a proposal to present at the
conference. If you have something you’d like to share with the
community, both people who are new to blogs and/or experienced bloggers
please email the appropriate conference convenor above with your ideas.
The deadline to submit a proposal (just the proposal, not the finished
product) is September 30, 2006. One of us will contact you to finalize
the date of your presentation. Your presentation may be delivered in
any web-based medium (including but not limited to…podcasts, PowerPoint
files, blogs, websites, wikis, screencasts, etc.) and must be emailed
to your assigned conference convenor one week before it goes live, (see
above strands) so that it can be uploaded to the server.

The conference organizers are:

Darren Kuropatwa

Darren Kuropatwa is currently Department Head of
Mathematics at Daniel McIntyre Collegiate Institute in Winnipeg,
Manitoba, Canada. He is known internationally for his ability to weave
the use of online social tools meaningfully and concretely into his
pedagogical practice and for “child safe” blogging practices. He has
more than 20 years experience in both formal and informal education and
13 years experience in team building and leadership training. Darren
has been facilitating workshops 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).

Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach

Sheryl is a technology/education consultant for the
National Education Association (NEA), the Center for Teaching Quality,
SRI International, the Virginia Community College System, the Virginia
Department of Education, the Miami-Dade Public Schools, and the Alabama
Best Practices Center. She has had several journal articles and book
chapters published, been featured on public broadcasting television and
radio shows, and is a regular presenter at local, state, and national
conferences speaking on topics of homelessness, teacher leadership,
virtual community building, and 21st Century learning initiatives.
Sheryl blogs at 21st Century Collaborative (

http://21stcenturylearning.typepad.com/blog/).

Will Richardson

Will Richardson is known internationally for his work
with educators and students to understand and implement instructional
technologies and, more specifically, the tools of the Read/Write Web
into their schools, classrooms and communities. A public school
educator for 22 years, Will’s own Weblog ( Weblogg-ed.com) is a primary
resource for the creation and implementation of Weblog technologies on
the K-12 level and is a leading voice for school reform in the context
of the fundamental changes these new technologies are bringing to all
aspects of life. Will is the critically acclaimed authour of the
best-selling book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Tools for
Classrooms (March 2006, Corwin Press).

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