Snippets from NECC 2007 Tuesday June 26th

…(Shaking my head while looking at photos of all of the “bagged bloggers”)…

Here’s a “shout out” to all of the Houstonians attending NECC in Atlanta! Guess what’s happening back home… rain, rain, and more rain… Somebody should bring me back a red “Teacher 2.0″ t-shirt (or an iPhone!)

On to the real news…

Great stuff in the RSS feeds today! This REALLY makes me wish I was there to enjoy all of the fun and the learning (all of the FUN learning!).

It appears that the day started off with an excellent Keynote: What do the arts, brain research, and creativity have to do with the emerging face of education? EVERYTHING! (wish I could have been there!). Fortunately for me, Wesley Fryer, Laura Fogle, Mark Van Hooft, Alfred Thompson, and Whoever writes the Not so Distant Future blog were all there and were all taking great notes! There was quite a bit to this keynote and I’ll have to come back to all of these session notes before going into too much depth into my own thoughts. Good stuff!

Vinnie Vrotny writes a very reflective post on the relationship between conference learning and classroom learning with regard to the use of technology to facilitate one’s ability to learn any-time-any-where rather than being restricted to physical space. This is a great post with good points about what this means for teachers who are trying to engage today’s learners — it can’t just be sit-and-get and the learning opportunities should be flexible enough for all learners. His description of navigating a conference with laptop-in-hand is familiar to those of us who are actively using emerging technologies in our own professional learning.

John Pederson also posted some thoughts along very similar lines –very thought-provoking!

Here are some notes from the Empowering Practice: Leveraging the Read/Write Web for Professional Growth session (sorry — couldn’t figure out blogger’s name — please email me so I can make correction). This is a great primer for teachers who have not yet started using wikis, blogs, RSS aggregators, or social bookmarking tools for their own professional learning. The message here — start using these things now because our students need to learn how to use these tools effectively, efficiently, and safely — and they need us to be skilled models of life-long learning who are fluent in this new “language”.

This same blogger shares notes from Wesley Fryer’s Reinventing Education for the 21st-Century (Designing School 2.0) session. This “conversation” continues over on Wesley’s blog where he has posted three questions for all of us to discuss.

Speaking of “Social Bookmarking” — Megan Golding shares her notes from Redesign Research with Social Bookmarking which includes good information on using del.icio.us effectively for research and learning.

School 2.0, School 2.0, School 2.0! Who WASN’T live-blogging this session?! I came across session notes from Wesley Fryer, Jeff Utecht, Chris Lehmann, Chris (Crucial Thought), and Ryan Bretag. Lots of good stuff in each of these posts — my favorite quote: “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” Jeff Utecht shares his screen and a chat between him and several other bloggers during this session. That one post by Jeff Utecht is such a good example of School 2.0. We need to learn how to be better teachers in this emerging environment. Imagine students chatting — about the content — while sitting in the classroom — or away from the classroom — during instruction… teaching/learning is no longer a one-way interaction. No Dorothy, indeed, we are NOT in Kansas anymore! Funny quote from the chat — “[9:23:15 AM] Vinnie Vrotny says: and now we know why so many kids are being diagnosed with ADD.”

Tim Wilson posted some links related to his session on Podcasting — he’ll be posting updates later today.

Darren Draper has been blogging quite a bit over the past couple of days and I enjoyed reading his post on Ron Clark’s presentation. Of course, now I’m envious of Ron Clark for being able to open such an innovative school — but I believe we will continue to see more innovative “start-ups” over the next several years across the country. We just have a very big country with lots of kids who need to be educated, and we all know how difficult it is to change large institutions. It’s going to take time… and it’s going to take imagination. I also can’t help but think that it’s going to take the willingness of educators to engage the students in the reinvention process as well. Too many of us (the adults) just keep recreating the same old system. Maybe we just need to stop, pay attention, and listen to the kids a little more often — especially when it comes to re-imagining what school — formal education — should look, feel, and be like.

On a related note — but not coming directly from NECC — Quentin D’Souza has aggregated some research on the use of blogging in K-12 classrooms. I think all of the Web 2.0, Classroom 2.0, and School 2.0 advocates might find some of the research listed in this post very interesting! I certainly did.

Whew! What a day! I’m exhausted — I can only imagine how everyone in Atlanta is feeling right now! (And I still envy all of you ) I’m signing off for now (and going to a ball game this evening) so I will “see” all of you on Wednesday…

I won’t be posting snippets for tomorrow until much later tomorrow evening because I will be at a meeting of my leadership academy cohort during the day.

Technorati Tags: blogging, change, edtech, edublogger, education, innovation, instruction, instructional technology, ISTE, learning, NECC, NECC07, NECC2007, School2.0, teaching, technology, virtual_attendee, Web2.0

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