Twenty Ten

The first three weeks have gone by in a blur and I have not blogged or tweeted much.  It seems to go that way for me, either I can't write the blog posts fast enough to keep up with ideas or I have no time to sit and write and my mind is blank.

Our school is about to pilot an open wireless program and I have been working with a team to compile suggestions for teachers who are really not all that comfortable with the prospect.  We want to offer them some management solutions and ideas for harnessing the power of student mobile devices.  When I have the list organized I'll link to it here.  In the meantime, do you have any suggestions?

We're getting ready to celebrate the 2010 Olympics here in Vancouver, signing students up to take the Healthy Living Pledge and preparing banners to welcome the torch relay as it passes through our community.  For those of you in the area the Vancouver Sun will be publishing a series "Bound for 2010" starting Jan. 26.

Our district's Learning Innovation Leadership Team has been moving ahead offering a variety of ProD sessions to teachers and administrators.  In addition to our regular LAN parties (see our K12 Online Presentation) we have begun using Elluminate, free to B.C. Educators.  Bryan Hughes (@bryanhughes) hosted our first two sessions giving participants an introduction to Elluminate and its features.  A recording of this session is available here.  We welcome people from outside the district so if you'd like to participate check out the LAN calendar of events and follow LAN44 on Twitter for updates and links.  For more information have a look at the LAN44 blog.

Got 20 Minutes?

If you've read much of this blog you'll know that I'm a big fan of the K12 Online conference and have been involved with bringing these presentations to teachers in my own district via LAN parties.  It made me smile to hear one seasoned colleague say that these sessions were the best professional development he had experienced in his career.  Wow!

I've been viewing as many of this year's offerings as I can and they're as inspiring as ever.  The one that stands out for me so far in terms of the way we work with students is Paul Curtis' Building a Web 2.0 Culture.  We chose it to show at our first LAN party of the year and Paul generously offered his time to join us in an Elluminate session for some discussion after we viewed his presentation.  The chat is archived here.  He's part of the New Technology Network whose philosophy is to inspire and engage students to become collaborators, thinkers, innovators and leaders.  Whether you're transforming a school or just wanting to improve your practice on Monday morning this presentation will get you thinking.

In order to keep the presentations straight in my head I started a Google Doc to briefly list the focus of each presentation.  Here are a few I will definitely be bringing to the attention of others:

• Sylvia Tolisano's Around the World With Skype
• Jason Neiffer's Probing the Possibilities of Paperless Pedagogy in which he gives a tour of his own paperless classroom, comments on using Google docs, Wordpress and Moodle.
• Julie Lindsay's Learning Confluence: where philosophy meets practice in the 21c addresses why education needs to be globally focussed.
• Kelly Hines' Little Kids, Big Possibilities gives a how-to for several tools she uses with her class She has set up some trial accounts for session viewers to play in the sandbox.  A great way to dip your toes in.
• Andy Crozier and Mike Amante talk about Just a 'touch' of leadership: Using the iPod Touch/iPhone in Administration giving lots of hands-on ideas.
• Sarah Sutter's Show and Tell: Exhibit, Reflect, Critique with Blogs is excellent for art teachers but the her ideas transfer to other subject areas as well.

Grab some refreshments or even a colleague or two and pull up a chair for some engaging viewing!  Most will take less than 20 minutes of your time to view.