Steve Hargadon...Web2.0 is the Future of Education

Teaching Zach to Think with Alan N

Alan November Keynote Live Blog

Conference happenings...

A listing of some of the professional development experiences that I'll be participating in this fall:

University School of Milwaukee mini-conference day with Alan November (October 13th)- This idea was actually hatched two years ago while at the National Social Studies Teachers conference in Washington DC with Bigbri, Chuck and Pipes. We talked about how powerful it would be to offer our own conference at USM. Last yearat this time we decided on going forward with the day an we confirmed Alan November as the day's keynote speaker. From there, we added a graet speaker line-up for the break-out presentations and the hands-on workshops. The budget for this day is significant, but I think this is a fantastic model when you consider that over 100 faculty members will be a me to experience this powerful day. I'm excited to see my former colleagues and to meet Sharon Peters, someone whom I've admired for quite some time now, in person!

Yahoo Digital Citizenship Summit with Chris Lehmann as the keynote speaker (October 3rd). This was a fantastic event and I thank the good folks at yahoo for providing this e perience for free. This day really confirmed many of the things we know about the digital lives of you g people. Like Larry Magid, one if the Internet Safety panelists, said, "99.9% of the things that youth do online are good." not that the Internet stranger range myth has officially been dispelled, it is time we start leveraging the potential associated with digital social networking platforms.

Innovative Learning Conference (October 15th and 16th) in San Jose- this conference, I have a feeling, is going to be excellent. I get back from Milwaukee on Tuesday and will be at the ILC on wednesday and Thursday. Four of our teachers will also be going down to ILC to spend a day attending some of the excellent concurrent session offerings. This is nice be ause I'll be able to connect with some of my new colleagues while I down there. My school has also made the committmen to send four members of our administrative team down to theMonday afternoon leadership session with Chris Lehmann. I think they'll learn a great deal and have an excellent time working with Chris and learning about some of the powerful strategies that his team at the S ience Leadership Academy in Philly are using to give their students authentic and powerful learning opportunities.

National Social Studies Teachers conference in Houston (November 14-16) - This will be my third consecutive year at NCSS. This time around I'll be co-presenting alongside former colleague and master teacher, Chuck Taft of American History Rules fame. Chuck and I will be doing a session on we 2.0 methods and tools in the social studies classroom on Friday afternoon.

Chris Lehmann unconference session at Yahoo Digital Citizenship Summit

Chris facilitated an un-conference style discussion in the afternoon of last Friday's Digital Citizenship Summit. During this session he skyped in one of his teachers, talked about strategies to introduce administrators to web 2.0 technologies, iChatted with some students, and talked about social networking as a learning platform.

Below is the recorded audio from this session...



Link to audio file

Yahoo Digital Citizenship Summit-Panel Presenter Recording

I recorded several Internet Safety experts/panelists as they gave short, 7 minute overviews on their programs and Internet safety/digital citizenship in general. This was a part of the Yahoo Digital Citizenship Summit at the Yahoo campus in Sunnyvale, CA on Friday, October 3rd. Larry Magid, co-author of Myspace Unraveled, gives the first 7 minute talk and I would say it is a MUST listen for anyone who has children and/or works with children. It is interesting how the message is turning from one of panic and fear to one that is more rationale and grounded. It was a breath of fresh air to hear these panelists reiterate over and over again that the Internet is not the dangerous place that our media makes it out to be.

Finally, I just want to say a huge thank you to the team at Yahoo for putting on this conference. The keynote and break-out sessions were outstanding (the food wasn't bad either!!) Thank you for providing this opportunity to educators for free.





Link to original recording

Dean Shareski on Parents as Partners this coming Monday night (9 PM Eastern)

Please join the Parents as Partners webcasting crew this coming Monday as we talk with Dean Shareski about issues of digital citizenship, students as content creators on the open web, and what we all can do to help mentor young people as they develop their online profiles/footprints. We're pretty much centering our talk on a slidecast that Dean created and posted on his blog a few months back. Check his slidecast out here. Dean is a fun dude and this should be a fun conversation.

Please join the webcast and invite other parents to join in the conversation by doing the following:

1. Go to http://www.edtechtalk.com/live at 9:00 PM Eastern Time.
2. Sign into the chat room with your first name/last name...no password is required.
3. Click one of the little audio player icons and the live audio will play in one of your media players (iTunes, Windows Media player, etc). See picture below:



4. People in the chat are really friendly and enjoy 'meeting' new people and engaging in coversation.

Hope to 'see you' for the Parents as Partners broadcast this coming Monday with Dean!!

Chris Lehmann at Yahoo Digital Citizenship Summit

More thoughts on this later, but below you'll find a link to the audio file from Chris Lehmann's keynote talk today.



Link to recording of Chris' talk

Yahoo Digicitizenship Summit Live Blog...

I attended this summit today at the Yahoo campus in Sunnyvale, CA. Below is the live blog coverage of a series of panelists speaking to the issue of digital citizenship. Please excuse the spelling errors and please note that I'm mostly paraphrasing what the presenters mentioned as they spoke.

To read this blog, you'll have to click on some of the text and then use your arrow up/down keys to move through this live blog....

Why Linux in K12?

Minhaj Rehman, whom I met via Worldbridges and the Webcast Academy, sent out a Facebook update today with a link to an article titled, "100 Reasons Linux Beats Windows." I'm an open source evangelist and for years, I've been attempting to convince IT folks that Linux and open source software need to be a part of the K12 computing mix. Inspired by Minhaaj's update and David Williams' excellent column over at the IT Wire, I thought I'd take a stab at listing out reasons why Linux and open source need to be a large part of the K12/K20 experience:

1. Equity-schools have always been about equity. Whether it is a school serving low income families or a private, tuition based schools, all schools deal with issues of equity on a regular basis. Linux evens the game, giving all students the opportunity to use the same powerful tools at home as they use at school.

2. At a minimum, students need to be exposed to the open source software development model. This model is growing rapidly and providing more and more opportunities to those who understand it. Last year we had a doctoral candadiate in robotics come speak with our student body and she mentioned that they primarily use open source software in the world of robotics. She asked the students if they knew what open source software was and out of 350 students, I don't think one hand was raised. This needs to change.

3. Open source provides students with highly authentic learning opportunities. Imagine young students who create a game using Scratch and then upload it to the online Scratch community so others can take the code, modify it, and improve on it. These are the kinds of authentic opportunities that young people may participate in NOW.

4. Let's face it, schools don't have the budgets that they should have...and this probably isn't going to change any time soon. Why not take all of the money that is spent on proprietary software and use it for the things that really count?? I'm talking about professional development and teacher salary enhancement.

5. "Linux plays well with others." Linux runs efficiently on old hardware and schools have alot of old hardware. Vista, on the other hand, is ridiculously high maintenance when it comes to hardware requirements. As a matter of fact, if you don't have the latest greatest hardware, Vista won't play with it. At some point in the near future Microsoft is going to stop its full support of XP, which will undoubtedly make many schools feel compelled to jump to Vista (or whatever is the next flavor of their OS). This means refreshing hardware in the school if this is the direction they will go. Instead of refreshing the hardware line, how about dumping Windows on the desktop in favor of Linux, which will play nicely on older equipment.

6. Do we really need all the garbage that comes with Vista?? 95% of the creative things that we do with our students can be done with a browser and some no-cost client software.

7. Like David Williams mentioned in his article, "Do we really want to give Jerry Seinfeld 10 million more dollars?"

Please feel free to add any additional reasons why Linux and open source should be a part of the K12 experience for students...

**Photo courtesy of Pitel on flickr (creative commons non-commerical)