always learning

Cross-posted on the K12Online Conference blog

I could not be more honored to be the pre-conference keynote speaker for this year’s K12 Online conference!

I have been participating in this annual conference since its inception in 2006 and every year I am amazed at the quality of presentations shared by educators around the world. The opportunity to learn together over the course of the conference (and beyond) is one of the most inspiring and engaging experiences of the year for me. Of course, this year’s lineup is no different!

When I was asked to keynote this year’s event, I knew right away that I wanted my presentation to have a global focus. Thinking back over the course of my ten years of living overseas, I realized that in many ways my exposure to new ways of thinking about technology has been paralleled by some similar learning experiences in the real world. I wanted to explore those links between virtual and real-world perspective shifts, and in the process try to share what I feel is an interesting and unique perspective in the expat mindset.

I’ve also decided to try to practice what I preach and make this presentation a true global collaboration, and although I will be putting together and presenting the final product, I really wanted to make it based on group input. Thankfully, my personal learning network includes a number of outstanding international school educators who’ve been willing to help me in preparing my presentation (thank you!). Right now I’ve gotten a lot of great input and material from (in no particular order):

• Jabiz Raisdana in Qatar
• Sara Patterson and 3 of her fabulous students in Korea
• Susan Sedro in Singapore
• Julie Lindsay, Jeff Plaman (and several of his fantastic students) and Tod Baker in China
• Clint Hamada and one of his wonderful students in Vietnam
• Maria Gomez in Saudi Arabia
• Steve Katz and 2 of his amazing students in Costa Rica
• Brandon Hoover in the Philipines
• Justin Hardman and Ryan Skardal in Hong Kong
• Brian Lockwood, Genki U. and Christine U. in Japan
• Darby Sinclair in Taiwan
• Dennis Harter in Thailand

While these teachers have already sent me fantastic material, I would love to include other perspectives as well. Knowing that the deadline is just over a month away, I’m beginning to put the final pieces together, and would love to hear your thoughts, include your perspectives, and emphasize the power of global collaboration in the final product.

Here’s the presentation overview:

Going Global: Culture Shock, Convergence, and the Future of Education

Everything I need to know about the future of education I learned, not from kindergarten, but from living overseas. Looking at daily life in foreign lands reveals a colorful spectrum of inspiring metaphors for the shifts we need to make in education. Featuring voices from students and teachers from around the globe, this presentation will start with a look through an expatriate’s eyes at some vibrant details of daily life in many lands. Often what we may find initially chaotic, disorienting and strange in other countries can actually spark new ways of thinking about teaching and learning.

Then, again through the voices and viewpoints of teachers and students from all around the world, we’ll examine the unique aptitudes which allow successful expats to thrive in any environment: adaptability, flexibility, the ability to understand differing viewpoints and constructs, and the communications skills to collaborate across cultural, religious and linguistic barriers. These are exactly the skills that future students and teachers will need to confidently enter the digital, global, converging, collaborative world of tomorrow – wherever they might be physically located.

What do you think? Does this sound interesting to you? Are you an expat or Third Culture Kid? Have you or your students participated in a global collaboration? What did you gain from that experience?

Our second K12Online LAN party was a hit! In order to appeal to a different crowd, we held this one at ISB Teacher Housing right after school on a Thursday evening. Although it was definitely more convenient for most teachers, trying to get energized and focused on learning after a long day of work was a little more difficult than our previous Saturday morning party. Thankfully, we had three amazing guests visit and chat with us via Skype, which kept everyone engaged for the two-hour event.

First up, we had the wonderful Allanah King from New Zealand share the story of how she got started using new tools like Skype, blogs, wikis and podcasts in her classroom. It was quite late for Allanah (I think something like 10pm) but she was as enthusiastic and passionate as always! Having Allanah there to start our party was a great way to demonstrate the power of connected learning from the outset – and to be able to use a tool, which is new for some, to kick-start our conversation was the perfect beginning!

After we chatted with Allanah, we watched Brian Crosby’s excellent presentation, “Video-Conferencing It’s Easy, Free and Powerful” about his experience using Skype in the classroom. I have to admit, no matter how many times I watch Brian and his students talk about involving Celeste in their classroom, I tear up. This presentation ended up, totally unintentionally I have to admit, setting the tone for our entire party. We spent most of our time talking about the power of Skype in the classroom. Chrissy and I shared a few examples and we brainstormed about the potential of bringing expert voices and outside guests into our daily learning environment.

Continuing along our Skype theme, we had a very welcome visit from Nancy von Wahlde in Madrid, Spain. Amazingly, two of our current ISB teachers, Erin and Ali, had worked with Nancy (and many of her colleagues) in previous years. We had an unexpected reunion, which really brought home the potential of Skype. Nancy was right in the middle of her day in Madrid, so we got to see a few of her students in action and experience the hustle and bustle of the American School of Madrid with her.

Finally, we had a perfectly-timed call with Chris Betcher – who was using Skype on his mobile phone while spending some time with his family (Chris, you never cease to amaze me!). Chris shared some of his IWB secrets (soon to be published in his book, Teaching With Interactive Whiteboards) as well as tons of advice on how to use Moodle in the classroom (which ISB has recently implemented in the middle and high schools). As usual, Chris had a wealth of resources to share, not only about IWBs and Moodle, but also podcasting, screencasting, and digital video editing (we got the inside scoop on how he made his fantastic K12Online presentation about tagging).

Although we had a somewhat makeshift setup (check out the wobbly projector stand we put together with some of Ali’s still unpacked boxes from her move to Bangkok this year), this was another powerful experience of learning together. At the end of the session, we brainstormed ways to kick ‘em up a notch to get even more people interested. Here are a few ideas that we came up with (mostly thanks to John, so I can’t take much of the credit):

• Send an e-mail to the people who have expressed an interest to get them talking about the event in an effort to create a “buzz.”
• Ask attendees what they want to learn about next – come in with a plan or a focus that can be advertised in advance (an excellent idea, requiring more work than I’ve put into the parties thus far). Although it was unintentional this time around, I really liked having a focus on one specific tool – sometimes it’s easier for people to wrap their heads around one idea than being bombarded with many different things.
• Finding a way to use the tools we’ve learned about in previous evenings in the weeks leading up to the next party.

One more thing that we plan to do next time around is share the new Elgg group that we’ve created for our early adopters – this is definitely our target audience!

We’re thinking our next session will be next Saturday, December 13th, back at my apartment downtown in the late morning. So if you’re around and interested in sharing your thoughts with us, please let me know! We love having guests and hearing all different perspectives.

Anyone have any suggestions for making our next party even more LAN-tastic?

After the success of our last K12Online LAN party, we have another one coming up this week! If you are in town, or even if you’re not, we would love to have you join us!

Our teachers absolutely loved experiencing the power of global connections firsthand. As Diane said to me last week, as often as we hear about the potential of these tools, it’s hard to truly understand until you experience them for yourself. So, if you have a few minutes to connect with us, we would absolutely love to connect with you!

Here are the details:

Dear Fabulous Colleagues,

We had a fantastic time learning together last weekend at our very first K12Online LAN party! Not only did we watch 2 excellent presentations and share some inspiring ideas, but we also had a lively discussion with another amazing educator, Silvia Tolisano in Florida via Skype. Check out a few pictures.

We found the event so worthwhile that we are planning to continue these casual sessions on a regular basis. Of course, we would love to have even more of our wonderful colleagues there as well!

Our next party will be on Thursday, November 20th from 3:30 – 5:30 (check your time here), with a plan to head to the River Tree House afterwards for a delicious dinner.

What: A mind-bending, inspiring, and energizing conversation about new teaching and learning practices based on a variety of K12Online presentations
When: Thursday, November November 20th from 3:30 – 5:30
Where: ISB Teacher Housing, Nichada Thani
Why: to get geeked! And to enjoy being among a community of learners so enthusiastic and excited about using new tools!

Please feel free to pass on this invite to any other teachers you know in the Bangkok area.

Please let us know if you’re planning on coming so we can prepare

We hope to see you there!

Any time I design a project for students I always try to complete each task for myself just to make sure I really understand what is involved – not only so I can better facilitate student learning, but also so I really know how much work it will take to complete. Often times, something that looks quick and easy can turn out to be much more complicated in practice.

Over the past few months I have had the chance to experience exactly the kinds of projects I frequently design for my students while creating a K12 Online Conference presentation with Jen Wagner. Given that the focus for our presentation was on globally collaborative projects, it seemed especially fitting that we would have to design our presentation from opposite sides of the planet. Keeping in mind that Jen and I have never met face-to-face, live 13,415 kilometers apart, and have a 14-hour time difference, I now know pretty much how my students feel when completing this type of project.

It was definitely an interesting and fun experience, although it did require quite a bit of planning. Jen and I set up a regular “meeting time” once a week (Sunday mornings for me, Saturday afternoons for her) via Skype, we kept a running log of all of our ideas on a Google Doc which we started with our conference proposal and used all the way up until the last few weeks of our planning, we used a Google Spreadsheet to plan out each and every frame in our presentation with all of the details (the topic, the text on screen, the speaker, the URL for the images and the date completed), and then we used drop.io to send versions of the video back and forth so we could offer advice and suggestions for editing.

Although Jen was creating her sections on a PC, and I was completing my sections, and compiling the finished presentation, on a Mac (using iMovie HD), we had absolutely no compatibility issues: file-sharing large files was a breeze with drop.io and Gmail, finding and sharing the right images was no problem with Flickr Creative Commons and iStock Photo, and collaborating on our supporting resource wiki along with a wiki for a collaborative project for our presentation participants could not have been easier.

The experience of envisioning, planning and creating this kind of globally collaborative project with a partner I only know through online communication was not only exciting and challenging, but it was all the more rewarding because we were able to do just about anything we could imagine – despite our physical distance. I love the fact that we were able to discover similar interests through reading each other’s blogs, and over time develop a connection that actually lead to the shared creation of ideas. Definitely an opportunity to practice what we preach.

I would love to hear your thoughts on our presentation, either as a comment on this post, or as part of our reflective VoiceThread (below), it’s almost exactly 20-minutes long, and I hope (at least) reasonably entertaining! All of the resources that we mention can be found on our presentation wiki, and we invite you to join a new globally collaborative project called The Reading Connection if you’d like to try out this type of learning in your classroom.

I am so excited to be presenting at the K12Online Conference with Jen Wagner this year! For the last two years I have watched the amazing and inspiring presentations created for this conference and I still can’t quite believe that my voice will be among them this year…

Just to whet your appetite, Jen and I have created two teasers (check out all of the teasers here as they’re posted) for our presentation: Connecting Classrooms Across Continents:

Thinking back, the first K12 Online Conference in 2006 was when I realized just how powerful the network can be – watching, listening and participating in all of the fantastic presentations totally opened my eyes to new ways of thinking and learning. If you haven’t participated in previous years, I can promise you won’t be disappointed. Personally, I love the fact that all the presentations are posted online so I can watch them anywhere, anytime – and refer back to them over and over again.

Plus, it’s totally free!

So, please, download the poster and share it with your colleagues !