No-Brainer Free Online Technology Conference for Teachers
It’s free. It’s for beginners. Or geeks. It’s going on now. It’s the K12 Online Conference 2007:
The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2007 conference theme is “Playing with Boundariesâ€. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 8, 2007. The following two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog for participants to download and view.
Here’s a small sample of what’s been presented already (and available for free download):
- Inventing the New Boundaries by David Warlick, author of Classroom Blogging: A Teacher’s Guide to the Blogosphere: “For decades, education has been an easy institution to define. It consisted of a set of accepted literacy skills, a definable body of knowledge, and the pedagogies for teaching those skills to willing students who were arranged in straight rows. Today, for the first time in decades (in generations of teachers), we are facing the challenge of changing our notions about teaching and learning to adapt to a rapidly changing world. We are struggling to rethink what it is to be educated, to reinvent the classroom, and redefine what it is to be a teacher and a student. There is much that has changed, and for much of it, we have responded to by attempting to ignore, filter, or to block it out. This presentation, by 30+ year educator, author, and technologist, David Warlick, will explore some of these changes and challenges and arrange them as a set of converging conditions that might just help us to redefine and retool the 21st century classroom.”
- Travel through Space and Time by Lanie Ritter Hall: “Global awareness is making its way into the educational landscape. We are recognizing that our students are growing up in a ‘flat world’ and cannot afford to live isolated from learning about other languages, cultures, traditions and points of view. The presenter took over 400 students and their teachers along…virtually…as she traveled physically half way around the world to China. Learn how, through the power of web 2.0 tools, she seamlessly combined a blog, podcasts, photos and videos to educate students about cultural universals, while addressing curriculum standards.”
- More than Cool Tools by Alan Levine, Brian Lamb and D’Arcy Norman: “There is no shortage of ‘Cool New Web Tools’ out there and all three of us are guilty as charged for presenting them to teachers via the firehose effect. In our session, we will begin with a nostalgic nod to our presentation past where just 3 years ago we were talking up “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” – blogs, wikis, and a little RSS. Now there is so much more, almost too much. So we may talk about some cool tools, but more at a level of looking at the affordances which make them compelling, and why these and future breeds of tools and platforms matter to K12 teachers.”
And check out these workshops yet to come:
- Step by Step – Building a Web 2.0 Classroom by Drew Murphy
- Sustained Blogging in the Classroom by Jeff Utecht
- Learn to Blog: Blog to Learn by Anne Davis
Run, don’t walk to the K12 Online Conference 2007. To get free audio and video of the presentations, subscribe to the following feeds in iTunes, Google Reader, or whatever blog reader you use:
