Musings - Just Learning

Karl Fisch - Did You Know He Was a Best Buy? NECC 2007

Originally uploaded by sharonpe.

Sorry, Karl - I couldn’t resist the title!

While we were in Atlanta at NECC 2007, a bunch from the bloggers’ café poked fun at the HUGE Best Buy bags that were being given out and we had our pics taken in the bags. To see more bagged bloggers, check out the photos with the tag “bagged, necc2007, (or) necc07″.

With time to catch a breath or two in my schedule, my somewhat relaxed mind has returned to blogging thoughts. I am here in Mont Tremblant resort at a family lodge with my husband’s family reunion enjoying the Blues Festival (free outdoor stages with cool blues bands playing throughout the day), the lovely environment and great weather.

Today I took the opportunity to listen to a podcast from NECC 2007 as I walked a trail around the resort. Lori Burch does a great job of summarizing, synthesizing and evaluating several sessions from the Monday of NECC 2007.

Lori summarized and gave her take on the presentation entitled “21st-Century Learners Design Ultimate School of the Future Today” by Julie Evans which provided the results to the speakup survey conducted nationally by Project Tomorrow (alas, American nationally - not internationally) by willing schools. The survey is an ongoing project by tomorrow.org.

The central theme of the NECC presentation was the necessity of listening to the voices of the students as they articulate what the school of the 21st century should look like.

Julie Evans reported that the students who responded to the survey, our current generation of young Internet users, stated that *communication* was the number one motivation for why they used online tools. It was their desire to create and sustain relationships that drove them to use the Internet. Wow! This is my main motivation too! As I listened to the results to the survey, I found that my own forty-something experiences and motivations were quite similar to those reported by an overwhelming majority of teens.

From an educational perspective, this desire for sociality can be tapped for successful global projects. It reinforced my own experiences that students welcome an opportunity to communicate and establish relationships with students in other places around the world.

Lori reported that the most interesting aspect to the NECC presentation was the student panel that followed Julie’s report on the data results. Real students were there to voice their opinions and share their ideas about 21st education. Those students, just as I have found with my own students, were surprisingly practical and exhibited a good deal of common sense. They saw the potential of technology to further their learning experiences and offered some suggestions as to how to make this a reality. Without overtly saying so, they wanted the technology to become “invisible” and ubiquitous to all. They wanted less training on software and Internet tools and more access to the technology hardware (i.e. laptops and cell phones) and teachers. They stated their desire for good teaching practices (i.e. teachers! please update those homework webpages regularly!) and teachers who were accessible outside of class time.

The students were less concerned with Internet safety and more concerned with ethical online behaviours (i.e. plagiarism and bullying) which, to me, is in keeping with the (inter)national statistics about the dangers of online predators and the need for a course in digital ethics.

Lori also reported on the session about historical digital story-telling and is interesting as well, but not quite as compelling as listening to the voices of real students. All in all, I was quite grateful to learn vicariously through Lori’s audio report. Thanks, Lori!

Many of you are aware that my life has been choc-a-bloc full of activities in the last few weeks. Not only did I go through those crazy last few weeks of classes and exams with two parents in hospital (hundreds of miles away), present at NECC on three occasions, and start a new job, but I also had the awesome task of arranging and hosting a family reunion for my husband’s family (15 kids, 10 adults) - none of whom are local to us, but traveled from such diverse places as Ireland and Dubai. We are now all at the resort town of Mont Tremblant in the Laurentian mountains of Québec and I can catch my breath for a moment or two.

I just now FINALLY uploaded my photos from NECC 2007 to Flickr and what special memories they brought back!

Here is a collection of some of them:

bagged, utecht, walsh,

I was only very briefly able to get the edubloggercon yesterday at the Georgia International Convention Centre. However, from what I saw, it was like a distilled version of NECC itself with all kinds of people whose blogs and activities I have been following for the past year. It was especially exciting to meet so many of our WOW2 webcast guests face-to-face!

Last night a few of us had dinner on the revolving restaurant at the very top of the Westin. Terry Freedman, editor of Coming of Age, Cheryl Oakes, Julie Lindsay, Vicki Davis, Kathleen Malsbenden, Vince Jansen and Deb Barrows were those amongst our group and the conversation, as you can imagine, was rich and full of laughter. What a thrill and privilege to hang out with such an incredible group of educators.

Now I am at Dave Warlick’s fantastic all-day workshop on Advanced Blogging (all right, true confession - he is making us do this blog entry as an assignment!). Already I am picking up some great ideas and resources! To benefit from the wealth of resources collaboratively made available to us, you can visit the workshop wiki.

As I did last year, I have posted my NECC planner calendar onto my server so that others can see my proposed schedule for NECC. You will notice that it is indeed an ambitious schedule with much overlap. My focus this year is on virtual schools and environments and sessions about IT integration for English Language Arts. These represent areas where my new job with LEARN will take me.

If you are at NECC and at are any of the same sessions, please do stop and say hello! I would love to connect with you!

Yesterday I said my final goodbyes to my many fabulous and exceptional colleagues at Lower Canada College where I have been teaching in the middle and senior school for three years. I want to again especially thank my IT Director, Gary Millward, and my headmaster, Chris Shannon, for their support and encouragement along the way. Chris and I chatted briefly and he was the one who said, “Sharon, you are in now in your zone. You and Vince are blazing trails while we administrators have the hard task of trying to move the QE2″. It was an interesting metaphor!

NECC 2007 will be awesome!! If you are at NECC, you are most welcome to join Women of Web 2.0 for the NECC webcast Supershow on the conference site - tentatively, the Blogger’s Café - at 9 PM on Tuesday night. Just show up to the centre with your NECC badge and mention that you are going to the show and you will be permitted into the building. We look forward to seeing you there!

If you can’t be there, please join us in the chatroom at EdTechTalk where you can catch the stream live from Atlanta and participate in the conversation!

I am hoping to do a LOT of podcast interviews and blogging - so keep your rss feeds rolling in!

While that was also the title of my recent article for the latest WOW2 newsletter, it very much captured the essence of my life in the last few weeks. Aging parents with health concerns, choices about lifestyle and a new job, and managing teenagers at various stages and milestones have all kept me grounded in the day-to-day life of “offline” activities.

In the midst of that, I have tried to keep up with my blog and online reading, as well as participation in active discussions and communities. It was my great pleasure to act as a judge recently in the FlatPlanet wiki Project, another wonderful global exchange. I missed the Second Life Best Practices Conference entirely due to other commitments and just plain need for refreshment and time off. This week’s Future of Education Conference has also kept me on my toes and I have been able to catch a few of the presentations. Cheri Toledo did a great job today at her presentation quite wittily called The Future of Teacher Education: Herding Cats and Moving Targets.

It is difficult to be leaving one job situation (esp. high school teaching) while very much preoccupied with thoughts of a very different situation that awaits me at LEARN. My headspace is in two places at once and this can result in a certain amount of cognitive overstimulation!

Many times this past year, I have felt that I was just not making a difference with influencing other educators (especially my own colleagues) in spite of all the new approaches and paradigms I was experimenting with in my teaching practices. Yes, I knew for certain my students were benefiting - and that was very gratifying, but I felt so “out there” compared to my colleagues. It can be a very lonely feeling. Early adopters are especially prone to this - I have heard this again and again from my online buddies.

So, I was especially pleased that in these last few weeks I have witnessed two of my favourite mentors take up the practice of blogging. This, to me, is big, is HUGE. Reuven Werber has been my collaborating partner faithfully for four years now and he has SO much wisdom and perspective to share. I have often told him he should be blogging his ideas, but he claims no time. It is so wonderful to see him finally sharing his important thoughts with other educators in Classroom2.0.ning. Social networks like Ning offer this important sense of community of belongingness that is necessary for so many of us.

I am particularly charmed to see my friend and new colleague, Vince Jansen, take up blogging. Vince came to my attention a few years ago when he was providing professional development to other IT teachers in the Montréal area. For the past year, we have been communicating and even collaborating on several projects. Because he has always lived in a rural setting, he has chosen an … ahem… farm theme for his blog, Views from the Haystack. It kinda works…. except that part about me and pitchfork is just NOT TRUE! I am not sure how I feel about being associated with tools with prongs at the end! He will be a great addition to the edublogosphere and I have told him many times he should be blogging his great ideas and wisdom to a global audience!

WOW2 continues to canter along a good pace (this farm theme has provided a bit of fodder, hah hah) and we welcome Chris Craft tonight and Bernie Dodge (of WebQuest fame) next week. NECC 2007 will be upon us in no time at all - this week I confirmed my intention to blog the conference again this year. With three presentations at NECC, and other such engagements, I am beginning to wonder if sleep will be at all possible, but boy! am I looking forward to meeting so many of you!

I am so thrilled to announce that my students have captured TWO awards for their contributions to collaborative online projects with global partners.

Two weeks ago, I learned that our entry for the Global Virtual Classroom website design contest, Immortals and Heroes of the World had been awarded the second place silver award for outstanding website design. My grade 7 students were absolutely delighted by their recognition for work well done. We had terrific partners at Percy Julian Middle School in Oak Park, Illinois (Janet Barnstable - teacher) and Santan Junior High School in Chandler, Arizona (Shaun Creighton - teacher).

Yesterday, I received word that my grade nine students’ international collaborative literature project, From Jerusalem to Montréal, was awarded second place for the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) (Special Interest Group - Telelearning) Online Learning Award. My partners for that project (not quite finished) are Karen Guth and for the fourth consecutive year, my very good friend, Reuven Werber.

Students in my English class have been participating in this international collaborative literature exchange with students at Neveh Channah School in Israel since last October. They have shared literature about Montréal to the Israeli students while also studying some literature based on Jerusalem. The LCC students were also asked to perform peer reviews on the research projects by the Israeli students. Videos and personal reflections about the literature were also exchanged.

This project will be on display at the upcoming National Educational Computing Conference in Atlanta at the end of June.

My students have worked very hard on these projects and I am so proud of them.

I am pleased to share that the first place award for the ISTE Online Learning Award goes to the very deserving Flat Classroom Project headed up by Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis. Congratulations to both of them and their students! Well done!

These awards have come at an important moment in my career as I have had to make a very difficult decision to leave my current teaching position at Lower Canada College (the best school in the world) and accept a position with LEARN Québec, an educational foundation associated with the ministry of education here in Québec. While I am very sad to leave behind my wonderful, amazing students, I am excited with the potential of my new job at LEARN.

More to come on that later….

I am breaking my vow of silence during my marks and reporting frenzy (due in tomorrow), to announce a few exciting developments.

NECC 2007 in Atlanta!

What we have long been waiting for has finally come through! WOW2’s conference proposal for NECC 2007 has been accepted!

This means that Women of Web 2.0’s very own Cheryl Oakes, Vicki Davis, Jennifer Wagner and I will be leading a panel discussion at NECC, tentatively slated for Wednesday, June 27th. Woo-hoo!

We are already talking about scheduling our own birds-of-a-feather soirée, so please keep that in mind if you are planning to be at the conference.

I am also absolutely delighted that my own proposal, based on my M.A. thesis research about online collaborative learning for high school students, has been accepted as well. That discussion session is tentatively scheduled for Monday, June 25th.

And while we are on the topic of conferences….

Last night, George Siemens and company have announced their own Connectivism Online Conference (scheduled for the second week in February-cost is free!) - sponsored, in part, by the University of Manitoba. So far, the speaker line-up includes George, Stephen Downes, Will Richardson, Terry Anderson, and Bill Kerr (a new name for me, but he is out of Adelaide Australia, so he must be good!). Quite an impressive group of heavy-weights! I have already signed up….

technorati tags:

Connectivism Online Conference, George Siemens, Will Richardson, Stephen Downes, Terry Anderson, Jennifer Wagner, Cheryl Oakes, Vicki Davis, NECC 2007, Women of Web 2.0