This was my first visit to #Educon and the last days have been spent reflecting on what I learned, what I heard and what I would like to share. Going all the way to Philadelphia from Norway to attend a two day conference is certainly showing commitment, and I was really eager to connect and join in the conversations. First observation was not a surprise to me; Americans (Canadians) are more willing to share than Norwegians. My idea is to try this at our school’s conference this year and the outcome I’m sure will be a little different. That aside, finding the right balance between presenting and discussing is also important. 1.5 hours pr. session was too much time on some of the topics, but I know many disagree with that.  And the outcome will also be influenced by the group you are in and the conversations you have at your table.

Today I spent some time listening and watching the Live video they took at each session. The quality is not great, some have a slow start, but many are worth watching.Click on conversations and the topic you want to watch to find these videos. Some of the most valued takeaways are the documents produced by the presenters and the participants. The idea that “none of us is as smart as all of us” plays well at this conference.

The guiding principles behind Educon are worth revisiting:

1. Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members
2. Our schools must be about co-creating – together with our students – the 21st Century Citizen
3. Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around
4. Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate
5. Learning can – and must – be networked

I did attend all 6 sessions and and if I was to pick and reflect on one of these “what happens when the kid run the building: school culture and progressive discipline in an inquiry school” with Chris Lehmann/Pia Martin is it. If you have the time you might want to watch it. I like the way they communicate with the students, what they do and the questions they ask:

Heard in session;  “Teach kids to make the smart decisions for themselves. Zero tolerance is zero understanding. Is there a link between your pedagogy and your school policy? How do you teach empathy? I showed you kindness and care. If you take advantage of that it is on you. I can get over that. It takes a lot of strength to be kind and caring. We structure care, we give students and teachers time. (read Chris’ blogpost about how they structure this here) It is all about your advisor and you, this way every student has an advocate. To make this happen the school has to structure for care. All that happens is through the advisor. We love them all, even when they do something wrong we remember that they are people. They have the rest of their lives to learn that people suck they don’t need to learn that from school. The teachers leave their ego at the door They are there to help students learn, Everyone is a collaborative learner, student and teacher. I also included a picture from my last session with “Forging student/teacher relationships in an era of shared learning with Jeff Kessler @jeffk8 and Tyrone Kidd. Great students at SLA, it was a good way to end the conference. Thanks guys!

Related articles

• Educon 2.4 Reflections 2012 (edtechpower.blogspot.com)
• 5 Things I Love about Educon (edtechpower.blogspot.com)
• UStream Broadcasts from EduCon 2.4 (downes.ca)
• Schools with no digital footprint: weed them out? (classroomconversation.wordpress.com)
• What If Schools Created a Culture of “Do” INSTEAD of a Culture of “Know?” (teacherleaders.typepad.com)

“We do what we got to do, so we can do what we want to do.” 

Pre-study activities:

1. I plan to use The Question Formulation Technique here. In short it goes like this: When students know how to ask their own questions, they take greater ownership of their learning, deepen comprehension, and make new connections and discoveries on their own. Source: Harvard Education Letter. 
2. This activity is started by the Teacher designing a question focus .Here are several to start off the activity:  How to master the art of debating and how it was to grow up as an African American in the south during the 1930’s.  Jim crow laws , Harvard University, lynching, the great depression a debate team
3. Give out post-it notes to the class or use wallwisher and work in groups of 4.
   a:) Produce Your Questions (Ask as many questions as you can. Do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer the questions. Write down every question exactly as it is stated.  Change any statement into a question.
   b:) Improve Your Questions, Categorize the questions as closed- or open-ended.
   C:) Prioritize the Questions • Choose your three most important questions. Why did you choose these three as the most important?

Watch the movie!

After- movie activities:

1. Did the movie answer any of your questions?
2. Use one or two of your questions to write a post on your blog.

Topics for discussion and activities in class:

1. Trying Out Web2.0 the great debaters, based on the points given here chose a topic to discuss in class.
2. Read this text in groups of 3 discuss the questions on each page.

The learning objectives:

In this brief introductory course, the diligent student will:

1. Understand the origins of intellectual augmentation
2. Be introduced to internal and external tools for managing information flows
3. Be introduced to the theory and practice of tuning and feeding personal learning networks through curation tools and practices
4. Be introduced to the interdisciplinary study of cooperation and collective action

My first homework is as follows:

Infotention activities

1. I created an information dashboard using netvibes and have started with two tabs. One for RSS feeds of my favourite blogs to read, and also my del-icio-us bookmarks and my Twitter feeds. The other tab has search engines set up to search for information about my school. That is advice I found in the book “What School Leaders Need to Know About Digital Technologies and Social Media“. I posted a screen-capture of my dashboard below. 2. I created a twitter paper based on the following topics; the following hashtags. #plpnetwork #educon, #vflr, and some additional single twitter users I enjoy reading.

3. Reflecting on this process involves thinking about what kind of information I am seeking and what kind of tools I can use.  When I started working with this I realized that I need a mental and social strategy on how I am going to deploy my attention. I started off by searching information I think is relevant to me, but I have not till now been able to filter the information. My RSS feed has 851 new articles and it is clear to me that it is only a stress factor to subscribe to that many posts without filtering. I need to work on where my attention is when building these tools. I need to decide what I want to pay attention to and when. Only then will I be able to find the appropriate tools to use to move the information to a place where if needed my attention can use it later! Information overload usually means that you do not find anything at all.

In education jargon, the word rubric means “an assessment tool for communicating expectations of quality”. Rubric actually means “a heading written or printed in red” (see main entry for rubric). Source: Wkipedia.

Rubrics are supposed to support student self-reflection and self-assessment as well as communication between student and teacher. In this new sense, a rubric is a set of criteria and standards typically linked to learning objectives, and used to assess product. In Norway neither the process nor the productivity is assessed, only the end-product or performance. The goal is to use the rubric as a basis for self-evaluation, reflection, and peer review. It is aimed at accurate and fair assessment, fostering understanding, and indicating a way to proceed with subsequent learning/teaching. This integration of performance and feedback is called ongoing assessment or formative assessment.

The University of Wisconsin, Stout has organized a nice collection of rubrics for assessing digital projects. In the collection you will find rubrics for assessing student blogging, student wikis, online discussions, twitter used for instructional assignments and video projects. Beyond the rubrics for digital projects there are rubrics for activities that aren’t necessarily digital in nature. For example, you can find rubrics for writing, research, and oral presentations. (free technology for teachers)

Related articles

• Rubrics for Assessing Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts (freetech4teachers.com)
• Assessment (netki11.wordpress.com)

Sweet Search is a search engine that searches only the sites that have been reviewed and approved by a team of librarians, teachers, and research experts. In all there are 35,000 websites that have been reviewed and approved by Sweet Search. In addition to the general search engine, Sweet Search offers five niche search engines. The niche search engines are for Social Studies, Biographies, SweetSites (organized by grade and subject area),

Ref Seek is a search engine designed for academic use. Ref Seek seems to eliminate the advertising and paid links found on Google, Ask, Yahoo, and other commercial search engines. Ref Seek’s intention is to serve only search results that are academic in nature. The difference between Ref Seek and a generic Google search lies lower than the top results in search returns. As you compare search results between Ref Seek and Google you will find that the second and third pages of search results on Ref Seek contain results that seem to be more “academic” than what is found on the second and third pages of a generic Google search.
Wolfram Alpha is billed as a computational search engine and this is exactly what it does. If students have any questions involving numbers, Wolfram Alpha is the place to go. Wolfram Alpha can be used for other searches, but it’s not nearly as useful for general inquiries as it is for computational questions.
Google Scholar is one of Google’s lesser-known tools. Google Scholar is a search engine designed to search scholarly journals, Supreme Court records, and patent records. In some cases the results will link to abstracts of books and articles that you will then have to obtain from a library or book retailer. In other cases results will link to fully viewable documents.

The Nobel Prize website has an educational games site designed to help students learn about subjects in the areas of Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economics. In all there are twenty-nine interactive games for students to play. Each of the science-related games and the economics game is based upon the research of Nobel Prize winners. The literature and peace games are based upon concepts central to the work of Nobel Prize winners in those fields. The banner on top lets you scroll through all the different games that are available.  Each game has a reading section the students should study before starting the game! Thanks to; Free Technology for Teachers for reminding me about this site!

1. To start this lesson look at “how to present in class“.
2. In pairs or small groups decide on 3 events that took place this week to present in class. In your presentations you are only allowed to use the pictures you find listed in the resources found below. You have to find pictures that include events in both Europe and the US.
3. Presentation should be about 3 minutes

Resources:

1. Week in pictures NBC
2. Days in pictures BBC
3. Pictures of the week TimePhotos
4. The week in pictures The Telegraph

Assessment:

1. Before starting this lesson the students should download the rubric to be used in assessment, oral presentation news 2011  and discuss the difference between advanced, proficient and developing.

You can vote here for any or all of the 18 categories until Tuesday, December 13.

Best Teacher Blog (vote here)
Ann Michaelsen, Teaching English with Web 2.0
Shelley Wright, Wright’s Room

Best Student Blog (vote here)
Sara (Ann Michaelsen’s student)

Best Librarian Blog (vote here)
Jenny Luca, Lucacept

Best Class Blog (vote here)
Kathy Cassidy, Mrs. Cassidy’s Grade 1 Classroom Blog

Best Administrator Blog (vote here)
Lyn Hilt, The Principal’s Posts

Best Individual Blog (vote here)

Will Richardson, Read. Write. Connect. Learn.

Best Individual Tweeter (vote here)
Alec Couros, @courosa
Dean Shareski, @shareski

Most Influential Blog Post (vote here)
Will Richardson, “My Teacher Is an App”

Lifetime Achievement (vote here)
Bud (the Teacher) Hunt
Will Richardson
Dean Shareski

At some point we all have to do a presentation and that is certainly true for students today. They are presenting projects all the time and the question is; how to do this without boring your fellow classmates! How much of your presentation will your audience remember and understand? Here are some easy rules and websites to explore.

1. Be Entertaining – Speeches should be entertaining and informative
2. Slow Down – Nervous and inexperienced speakers tend too talk way to fast.
3. Eye Contact – Match eye contact with everyone in the room
4. Don’t Read – This one is a no brainer, but somehow PowerPoint makes people think they can get away with it.
5. Speeches are About Stories – If your presentation is going to be a longer one, explain your points through short stories
6. Have Fun - Sounds impossible? If you have fun the audience will have fun too.
7. What is the big idea you want to leave people with? If you were to ask them after the presentation, will they remember?
   
8. Create Twitter-like headlines, easy for you, easy for your audience.
   
9. Create a list of three main points. Makes the presentation more manageable for you and your audience. 
10. If possible no more then 5 minutes! 15 tops!

Lesson plan:

Watch this presentation by a 6th grader. And answer the following questions:

• What is his passion, how does he present. What kind of tools does he use. Can you apply any of the above points to his presentation?
  

• Make a presentation of your own. Find a topic that really interests you. It does not have to be school related. It should be between 2 minutes. Your Power Point (if used) should be limited to pictures and/or graphs.

As a member of our community, you have access to a library of free, high-quality educational resources and can connect to other PBS Teachers to share ideas, strategies and resources.

Antonio Neves explores changes in the newspaper business, how stories are covered and delivered and the changes in economic models to secure their existence.