I guess summer vacation is more than half over. I have had some down time and some energizing time. Along with some of you, I attended two excellent conferences in Hot Springs and in a more unusual way, I attended the International Society for Technology in Education Conference. The conference was in Denver and attracted 18,000 or so educators with one binding passion, the exploding possibilities of technology in education. I attended the same conference in 2008 in San Antonio Texas and it was a professional life changing experience. This year my attendance had one very significant difference. I attended the conference from my home office. The experience of connecting to the goings on at a gathering some 1,000 miles away made as much impression on me as the overwhelming amount of new and innovative ideas.
By the end of day one, Monday June 28, I had about figured out my procedures. While I thought I was tech savvy enough to get at least a little from attending online, I had no idea what was possible. I quickly mastered the Ning page that gave me the starting points I needed. I figured out how to join Eluminate's sessions, which were not regular conference programs, but rather volunteers who presented on their own in a special area set up at the conference. I had to pick and choose since some of the over 30 sessions offered were not pertinent to my world, but most I "attended" were great. Next I found a search for handouts for sessions that interested me and collected about 100 documents, links, and blogs that I will review in the next few days. An associate had mentioned Twitter to me a few weeks ago, but I had not thought much about it since. Basically Twitter offers the opportunity to post short blurbs about where you are and what you are doing or thinking. How can that help at my virtual conference? Twitter has a unique little buddy called Twitterfall. Twitterfall mashes all the posts about a subject into a collection of what is being posted about a certain subject. Imagine now that a large portion of 18,000 folks at a conference are posting "tweets" about what they are attending. They are evaluating, posting notes, and links to the presenters information. WOW.
Now imagine this. I am sitting at my desk with my coffee, listening to a session on a shared whiteboard program, looking for handouts in the downtime, while thousands of folks are my eyes and ears posting to Twitter.
I know I say this so often that I get tired of hearing it myself, but this is the world our current students will live in. They will have to be information gatherers, sorters, and publishers. The 3 R's will be more important than ever, but in an entirely different way. 21st Century literacy will be a collection of skills based on the content we already teach, but delivered with new systems.
Our job? Expose our students to these skills without sacrifice for the core subject skills that are so important. While this is a daunting task, it is also exciting. I hope you are on board.

 

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