Tomorrow is Wolfram|Alpha’s Homework Day. The company is inviting students to submit their homework problems to see if/how Wolfram Alpha can solve them. Should be interesting…
Will you or your students be participating?
Tomorrow is Wolfram|Alpha’s Homework Day. The company is inviting students to submit their homework problems to see if/how Wolfram Alpha can solve them. Should be interesting…
Will you or your students be participating?
Interesting conversations are occurring, well-known edubloggers are advocating for their topic suggestions (see, e.g., Vicki Davis and Brian Crosby), and, perhaps most importantly for ISTE, there seems to be a fair amount of interest in its ‘choose your conference keynote’ project.
After just a few days, my suggestion is duking it out with Kevin Honeycutt’s for the top position:
I think Kevin is a great guy, but I don’t think his topic should be a keynote over mine. It seems to me that 95%+ of the ISTE conference every year is the same thing: tools, teachers, and classrooms. These are important, but as I said in one of my comments under my topic suggestion:
We've been relying on teachers & teacher leaders & tech integrationists & tech coordinators for decades now. Where's it gotten us in terms of systemic reform? It's gotten us isolated pockets of excellence in a few classrooms. When a principal "gets it," nearly the entire school changes (minus the few resisters). When a superintendent "gets it," nearly the entire district changes (minus the few resisters).
I'll repeat... It is the formal leaders (administrators, policymakers), not informal leaders, that have control over ALL of the important variables: money; time; personnel hiring, evaluation, and assignment; organizational vision and direction; professional development; etc. All you have to do is look at a school like the Science Leadership Academy to understand the importance and power of a formal leader that "gets it."
Why such pushback on a leadership keynote? It's not like we have one every year. In fact, we'd be hard pressed to remember more than a small few in the history of NECC/ISTE. ISTE has five keynotes and I'm a big fan of Kevin Honeycutt. But one of the keynotes should pertain to effective FORMAL leadership. Otherwise we'll just keep talking about tools and teachers like we always do...
So the gloves are off, Kevin! I don’t know if I can pull this off, but I’m not going down without a fight.
Thanks to everyone who already has voted for my topic and/or participated in the conversation. Any assistance that you can continue to lend me would be most appreciated; I need more people to vote for my suggestion and to spread the word about the contest. I’ve got an uphill battle and am going to need all of the help I can get!
Related posts
Related tweets
ISTE is asking us to help select one of its next conference keynotes. I am asking you to please vote for my suggestion:
As of this moment, the top three vote-getters all have to do with technology tools. Technology learning tools are important, but helping principals, superintendents, school boards, and policymakers understand what effective 21st century schools look like (and how to support and facilitate their creation and ongoing operation) is much, much more important.
Please go to ISTE’s keynote suggestion web site and give my suggestion three (3) votes. We need this issue at the forefront of our educational technology conversations and we need it at the forefront of ISTE’s work. We continue to talk about students and teachers and tools in the classroom – all of which are worthy topics – but NONE OF THOSE HAPPENS if the leadership doesn’t get it.
Note that this is just a vote for the topic. We vote later on potential speakers. You’ll have to sign in to vote but it shouldn’t take you more than a minute or two.
Let me know if you have any questions. Thank you for your support.
Russ Goerend posted a couple of short video snippets from our small Tweetup at ITEC 2009 (for some reason a host of Flip cameras suddenly emerged…). In addition to a number of us Iowa tweeps, David Warlick and Steve Dembo kindly joined in the conversation.
Here’s the first video:
And here’s the second one (FYI, the first 2.5 minutes is a repeat of the end of the previous video):
I love the end of the second video where Angela Maiers talks about the lack of teacher time to learn/do technology:
They have time to run copies. They have time to go make blackline masters. They have time to correct 15,000 true-and-false questions. They have time to make cute little art projects for kids to cut-and-paste for 45 minutes…
Happy viewing (and thanks, Russ)!
David Warlick is a wonderful speaker and an even more wonderful person. I was very fortunate to spend some time with him last night and this morning. I have very much enjoyed being a learner in his presence...
My notes from David’s second presentation at ITEC 2009:
See also: A gardener’s approach to learning
Keywords: personal learning network Warlick
Group notes from Daniel Pink's keynote speech at ITEC 2009.
Dr. Tony Wagner of Harvard University, who authored The Global Achievement Gap, is speaking to over 600 Iowa administrators and teachers today in Des Moines. Nearly 30 students are liveblogging their reactions to Tony’s presentation. Part 3 is below…
Dr. Tony Wagner of Harvard University, who authored The Global Achievement Gap, is speaking to over 600 Iowa administrators and teachers today in Des Moines. Nearly 30 students are liveblogging their reactions to Tony’s presentation. Part 2 is below…
Dr. Tony Wagner of Harvard University, who authored The Global Achievement Gap, is speaking to over 600 Iowa administrators and teachers today in Des Moines. Nearly 30 students are liveblogging their reactions to Tony’s presentation. Part 1 is below…
Three years, 20+ million online views, and many, many face-to-face showings later, the Did You Know? (Shift Happens) video still is going strong. Just this week it was mentioned in TIME magazine. Karl Fisch and I continue to get a bazillion e-mail messages about it…
Karl, XPLANE, The Economist, Laura Bestler, and I are very pleased to announce the release of Did You Know? 4.0, created for The Economist’s Media Convergence Forum in October.
I think XPLANE did an absolutely fabulous job with it, but let me know what you think in the comments. Downloadable versions and source files are available on the Shift Happens wiki under a Creative Commons license. Happy viewing (and please spread the word)!
Update: Be sure to read Karl's post on this too!
Much ado about nothing
I just read the text of President Obama’s hotly-contested speech tomorrow. I encourage you to do the same. Could it be any more innocuous? Whatever happened to waiting to see what happens first and THEN hollering about it? A lot of crying wolf has been going on lately…
If only these opportunities actually existed at scale
I was pleased to see this passage:
What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.
You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.
I just wish I had more faith in our current schooling system to nurture the problem-solving and critical thinking skills and creativity and ingenuity that the President mentions. Right now I don’t think we’re doing so well in these areas…
On Wednesday I spend the day with 80 or so high school students (juniors and seniors, mostly) in Northwest Iowa. What should I be saying to them about their schools, technology, globalization, and their futures?
For those of you who are interested, here are the final regular season standings for BlogBall09, our edublogger fantasy baseball leagues. As league commissioners, apparently both Jon Becker and I got to finish in 7th place, one spot out of the playoffs. Ugh.
The American School of Bombay (ASB) in Mumbai, India is hosting a 1:1 laptop computing conference in February 2010. While the conference is aimed at other international schools, it should be an excellent learning opportunity for anyone who can attend. I attended (and keynoted) ASB's first conference two years ago, brought my buddy, Dr. David Quinn, and had an absolutely wonderful time. I met a bunch of really great international educators and learned a lot about effective 1:1 programs. I highly encourage you to try and attend; Mumbai's a fascinating city! The conference is a collaborative effort of ASB, the Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation (AALF), the Laptop Institute, and the NESA Center.
If you'd like to submit a proposal to present, the deadline is September 5. The deadline to register and attend is November 15. More information on the conference - including how to register and/or submit a proposal - is at the ASB Un-Plugged Ning.
CASTLE will be sending three representatives to the conference. We're going to make sure we're there in time for the preconference with AALF, which looks totally amazing. ASB is the best 1:1 school I've seen to date; I'm looking forward to seeing how much progress they've made since my last visit. I'm heading up the leadership strand of the conference. Vicki Davis, Julie Lindsay, Doug Johnson, Scott Klososky, and Helen Barrett will be leading conference strands too. Hope to see you there!
Related posts
The University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) has started a new podcast channel and will be interviewing top educational leadership scholars from around the world about school administrator research and/or preparation.
The first live podcast will occur tomorrow and will feature Dr. Karen Seashore, who holds the Rodney Wallace Professorship for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning at the University of Minnesota. Karen will be discussing the linkages between P-12 school leadership and student academic learning outcomes. As a former faculty colleague of Karen’s, I know her well and anticipate that this will be a great conversation.
We here at CASTLE have been working with UCEA to get this up and running. CASTLE is one of several UCEA centers; I also serve as UCEA’s Associate Director of Communications. Stay tuned to the podcast channel to hear future interviews and, while you’re at it, sign up for UCEA’s Twitter feed if you’re interested in more school leadership resources.
Happy listening!
Here are my notes from Dr. Yong Zhao’s presentation, Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization, at the 2009 School Administrators of Iowa (SAI) conference…
Both of my NECC 2009 presentations are now available!
As I noted earlier, my first presentation, Effective Leadership in an Era of Disruptive Innovation, is available at ISTEVision. My second presentation, Why Aren’t You Having a Bigger Impact?, was targeted specifically at technology coordinators and is now available from Learning.com.
I think Learning.com did a really nice job of highlighting some of the main points of my presentation. Two links on the left allow you to watch the first and second halves of the presentation. You also can download my slides and an audio podcast of the session. I thought the questions and conversations were quite lively given that the session was at 7 in the morning!
Here’s a quick quote from the presentation:
The tech coordinators [like you] that I meet are very dedicated and hard-working. They’re really trying their very best to do a great job for their school and make everything run smoothly. So why do I hear so many complaints about you?
Happy viewing!
For those of you who are curious, here are the standings in our two edublogger fantasy baseball leagues at the All-Star break:
Well, it’s not every day that one gets within six feet of two presidents. Last Thursday, just as my colleague at ISU, Dr. John Nash, and I were walking out of our hotel, the motorcade for President Obama came by:
A couple of hours later I was hanging out with Nkubito Bakuramutsa, head of the ICT department of the Rwandan Development Board, just a few feet from Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s President. Later that evening Kagame won the World Technology Award for Policy:
Lawrence Lessig won the award for Law. Here are two quickly-recorded videos of his statements:
New York City’s a fun place. There’s always something cool happening!
Photo credits
Here are my notes from Day 2 of the World Technology Summit. I’ve been hangin’ with Dr. John Nash, my colleague at ISU. Today we learned about India’s Barefoot College (impressive!), Microsoft’s vision for the future, rotating buildings, petrofuel, ICT in Africa, and much more.
Bunker Roy, The Barefoot College
Photo credits
Here are my notes from Day 1 of the World Technology Summit & Awards in New York City. My colleague at Iowa State, Dr. John Nash, and I have been having eating from Halal stands, learning about Twitter and the Iran election, and enjoying the enhanced police presence for President Obama’s speech tomorrow celebrating the 100th anniversary of the NAACP.
Photo credits
Many of you have been participating in and/or following the conversations for this year’s CASTLE Summer Book Club.
I am pleased to announce that my interview today with Dr. Dan Willingham, professor at the University of Virginia and author of Why Don’t Students Like School?, is now available as either streaming audio or a downloadable podcast.
Happy listening!
For those of you who have asked, my Monday, June 29, afternoon presentation at NECC, Effective leadership in an era of disruptive innovation, is now available at ISTEVision:
FYI, you also might be interested in my K12 Online presentation on this topic. Happy viewing!
For Leadership Day 2009, here are some key questions that I’d ask about the technology leadership function in any school district:
I’m sure that I could think of other questions too, but these are a good start. Here’s why the answers to these questions matter:
I’m looking forward to the rest of the posts for this year!
Just a reminder that tomorrow is Leadership Day 2009 here at Dangerously Irrelevant!
You can see the posts from previous years at
Hope some of you will participate. The past two years’ posts have been awesome. Be sure to read over the guidelines for this year!
Since the past two have been so successful, I am putting out a call for people to participate in Leadership Day 2009. As I said two years ago:
Many of our school leaders (principals, superintendents, central office administrators) need help when it comes to digital technologies. A lot of help, to be honest. As I’ve noted again and again on this blog, most school administrators don’t know
- what it means to prepare students for the 21st century;
- how to recognize, evaluate, and facilitate effective technology usage by students and teachers;
- what appropriate technology support structures (budget, staffing, infrastructure) look like or how to implement them;
- how to utilize modern technologies to facilitate communication with internal and external stakeholders;
- the ways in which learning technologies can improve student learning outcomes;
- how to utilize technology systems to make their organizations more efficient and effective;
- and so on…
Administrators’ lack of knowledge is not entirely their fault. Most of them didn’t grow up with these technologies. Many are not using digital tools on a regular basis. Few have received training from their employers or their university preparation programs on how to use, think about, or be a leader regarding digital technologies.
So… let’s help them out.
Guidelines
On Sunday, July 11 12, 2009, blog about whatever you like related to effective school technology leadership: successes, challenges, reflections, needs, wants, etc. Write a letter to the administrators in your area. Post a top ten list. Make a podcast or a video. Highlight a local success or challenge. Recommend some readings. Do an interview of a successful technology leader. Respond to some of the questions below or make up your own. If you participated in years past, post a follow-up reflection. Whatever strikes you. The official hashtag for your post and/or Twitter is
#leadershipday09
Please also link back to this post to ensure that I find yours. If you don’t have a blog, comment on someone else’s post and/or send your thoughts to me and I will post them for you. I will do a summary afterward of what folks wrote and talked about [bloggers, this means some new readers probably will head your direction; this is a blog carnival for technology leadership!].
Some prompts to spark your thinking
Here are the ABSOLUTELY EXCELLENT posts from the past two years
A badge for your blog or web site
Please join us for this important day because, I promise you, if the leaders don’t get it, it isn’t going to happen.
Did you miss the extravaganza this year? Wish you were at NECC 2009 but couldn’t make it? Hate NECC and want to snipe from afar? Here are some resources that should help…
My final thoughts on NECC 2009
Photo credit: Waiting, Dean Shareski
Finally, for your viewing pleasure, David Warlick’s Edubloggercon ‘09 Animoto, which I think captures the informal, conversational nature of the experience quite nicely. See you next year in Denver!
I am by no means anti-corporation. And many companies have been very good to me and CASTLE. And I know they’re an important part of the NECC convention each year. And yet, when I went into the NECC 2009 vendor hall today, I was struck by the sheer extravagance of many of the booths: exhibits two or three stories high, a bistro, a singing Elvis, giant computers hanging from the ceiling like Damocles’ sword, an enormous white cave, a two-part neon-illuminated complex that was larger than my backyard, and more…
I’m not the only one who left a little unsettled:
The Bloggers' Cafe is buzzing and Twitter has been all-#NECC09-all-day.
For the most part, it seems like the educators here are mostly interested in access, connection, and sharing info via Web 2.0.
I didn't find a single booth downstairs that talked about any of those things. [Shelly Blake-Plock]
I can’t quite put my finger on what I felt down there today. A little sick at the waste / uselessness of it all (is bringing a pink Cadillac really going to help OKI sell more printers? do they have data on that?)? A wish for more substance and and genuine engagement and less flash?
Maybe it was just such a sharp contrast to the authentic interactions I felt I was having with folks in the Bloggers’ Cafe. Or maybe my crap detector was just on high alert…
Photo set: NECC 2009 Vendors
Here are my notes from the National Educational Technology Standards for Administrators (NETS-A) Release Celebration here at NECC 2009 in Washington, DC.
The Internet’s down here at NECC 2009. “Too many people – it overloaded the system” has been the response.
WRONG ANSWER. The convention center knew 14,000 techies were coming. If it couldn’t handle the bandwidth need, it shouldn’t have accepted the contract. Unacceptable response by the convention center.
I asked some ISTE people (staff? volunteers?) here in the hallway when the Internet will be back up and available. They said a reboot was occurring and hopefully everything would be fine in another 15 minutes. I said, “Okay. Well, sorry. I’m sure you’re taking some heat for this.” They shrugged their shoulders indifferently and said, “Oh, it’s no problem. We’re not worried about it.”
WRONG ANSWER. Indifferent to the Internet needs of the 14,000 techies who paid a boatload of money to attend the conference and who have expectations about access to the Web? Unacceptable response by ISTE.
Remember – your organization is only as good as the people who interact with your clients or the public…
UPDATE: I am pleased to announce that the Internet is back up again. Thanks, ISTE. Everyone, cross your fingers that it lasts!
Count ‘em: Four, yes four, CoverItLive sessions for Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote at NECC 2009 in Washington, DC:
If you can’t figure out what Gladwell talked about after looking at all of these, there’s no helping you!
The Twitter hashtag for Gladwell’s talk was #necc09mg – you can read everyone’s comments there or at #necc09. Most tweets were restatements and note-taking. Many were positive. Some weren’t. The pushback already has begun. Personally, I love what is happening now that everyone can have a voice, but I also have to note that this is one reason why academics are very reluctant to embrace social media. They are NOT used to having much pushback on their ideas, particularly from “the masses!”
These are my notes from the 3rd annual Constructivist Celebration, hosted by Gary Stager at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC.
Gary Stager
Melinda (Lindy) Kolk
Peter Reynolds (author of The Dot and Ish)
The sign of a good unconference is when every session you attend goes over time, people don’t want to leave, conversation pushes into the next scheduled session, etc. EVERY session I attended today was like this. Awesome (and thank you, Steve)!
Now, how do I get this format as part of the annual educational leadership professors conference?
NECC ‘09 and Edubloggercon ‘09 are underway! We had a quick intro from Steve Hargadon, then broke into sessions. I stayed for Vicki Davis’ Web 2.0 Smackdown. Here are the tools and resources that people showed:
I’m now in a small break-out discussion regarding the lack of female students’ interest in technology / computer science careers (and also science, math, etc.)!
Thought I’d share some recent publicity that CASTLE and I have gotten. I’ve been sitting on some of these for a while and wanted to get them all out so I can focus on NECC ‘09!
Edutopia
Quick: Name ten excellent Web sites related to the grade level or subject area you teach.
Scott McLeod, coordinator of the educational-administration program at Iowa State University, recently posed that question on his blog, Dangerously Irrelevant. Many of the comments his readers left echo McLeod's assertion that the Internet delivers "a paucity of high-quality online resources for educators."
McLeod and others don't deny the abundance of online resources teachers have at their fingertips. The challenge is sifting through all that stuff to find what you need -- and then knowing how to incorporate the gems into your curriculum.
T.H.E. Journal
SCOTT MCLEOD SAYS the great sin in the way professional development is provided in this country is one of omission. On his blog, McLeod, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Iowa State University and the coordinator of the department's Educational Administration Program, writes, "Most of our school leaders have received no training whatsoever when it comes to 21st-century schooling."
It is not totally their fault, he says. Few higher ed programs for administrators even have a course dealing with digital technology, and if they do, the course generally covers basic software, not leadership. Neither school districts nor professional organizations offer workshops in the area either. As a result, no movement can be made toward 21stlearning environments: When leaders are clueless about technology and the impact it can have in classrooms, they are powerless to change their school or district into one that provides tech-enabled instruction for students.
Fort Dodge (IA) Messenger (this link might expire?)
In a world where so much revolves around technology, high school students often only have the opportunity to use technology as part of their in-school learning process for an average of 30 minutes per week.
That is something that Scott McLeod, associate professor of educational leadership at Iowa State University, would like to see change in Iowa classrooms.
McLeod was the keynote speaker Tuesday afternoon at the Iowa Central Summer Science Institute at Iowa Central Community College, where he addressed a group of 25 high school and college science instructors on how they can implement technology in the classroom and why it is so crucial for students to be able to develop workplace skills and remain engaged in their course work.
ISU Talk About IT
ISU College of Human Sciences
See the original here… (pp. 18-19)
Happy reading / viewing!
A few weeks ago we decided to offer a technology ‘boot camp’ for administrators. CASTLE is working with the School Administrators of Iowa to make it happen. For those of you who are interested, here is some information on what we’re doing:
We started yesterday. Unlike our Transitioning Schools into the 21st Century workshops, which focused on technology leadership issues, the purpose of the boot camp is solely to ramp up school leaders’ technological skills. Our emphasis is on providing a safe space for administrators to learn and empowering them to walk away from the workshop with the ability to actually do this stuff. We’re taking our time, answering lots of questions, and covering whatever we can in the time that we have. We had participants blogging within the first hour yesterday. They were pretty excited!
We’ve got a great bunch of school leaders in this first boot camp. If today goes as well as yesterday, we’ll do a few more next academic year.
Any feedback that you have on what we’re doing would be most welcome. Anyone out there doing something similar? If so, how’s it going?
The 2009 Game Education Summit begins today in Pittsburgh. If you’re not attending, the keynote presentations will be streamed live and also will be available afterward. The summit looks awesome; it’s “the only conference where the video game industry and academics from around the world can come together to have meaningful conversations about the future of game development.”
Wish I could be there! Maybe someone’s liveblogging or there’s a Twitter hashtag for the event?
Whew! It’s consumed a lot of my time the past week but I am pleased to say that the 2009 CASTLE Summer Book Club is off and running! [Okay, more accurately, I should say that it has consumed a lot of the valuable time of Laura Bestler, CASTLE’s technology coordinator. Thank you, Laura!]
How to participate
Thanks to a few last-minute folks, our grand total is 246. Participants are busy introducing themselves (and learning how to comment on a blog!). If you want to follow the action, here are our four discussion groups:
Even if you’re not an ‘official’ participant and thus can’t post to the group blogs, you still can play along at home by leaving comments (be sure to read the copyright notice in the initial Getting Started post). If you’re interested, each discussion group also has RSS feeds and e-mail subscription options for both the posts and the comments.
Social media
The book club has a Twitter and Technorati hashtag (#castlebc) and a Twibe.
Hope you’ll join us for our live podcast with Dr. Daniel Willingham, the author of Why Don’t Students Like School?, at 12pm Central on July 13!
[Update: If you registered, please check your junk mail / spam folders. Many of you who thought you had not received an e-mail from me later found my message in there...]
Registration for the 2009 CASTLE Summer Book Club has closed. We have 238 participants this year, including myself. Whew! Participants come from the following countries:
I have divided us into four discussion groups. Last night I sent an e-mail to all participants that confirmed their registration and notified them of their group number. They will receive another e-mail this weekend that includes the URL of their online discussion area. The links to the four discussion areas will be posted here as well. Our conversations will be public and anyone can join us on an ad hoc basis as desired.
We start on Monday!
Mark your calendars
Dr. Daniel Willingham, author of the book that we’re reading, Why Don’t Students Like School?, has graciously agreed to do a live podcast with me on July 13 from 1pm to 2pm Eastern. Questions will be generated from our book club participants.
Related posts
Registration for the 2009 CASTLE Summer Book Club closes this Wednesday at midnight. To date we have 159 participants, which blows the doors off of last year’s total of 125. A week ago we had 81 participants, so we’ve effectively doubled the size of the group in the last seven days. Awesome!
We’re reading Why Don’t Students Like School? by Dr. Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia. I selected this book despite the fact that my alma mater, The College of William & Mary, is a fierce in-state academic rival of UVA so you know the book has to be pretty good! Sorry, those of you who have asked for a Kindle version...
Stay in touch as you have questions. I’ll see some of you online starting next week!
We’re down to two weeks before the 2009 CASTLE Summer Book Club starts and we’ve got 81 participants signed up already. That’s great!
We will be reading Why Don't Students Like School? by Dr. Daniel Willingham. I'm still deciding what online platform we’re going to use to facilitate our discussions. Last year we used Lefora. It worked pretty well but so far I’m leaning toward something different this year.
Here are some answers to a few questions that people have asked me:
Got other questions that aren’t answered here? Leave a comment below or drop me a note; I’ll do my best to answer them quickly.
After much deliberation, I’ve decided to do another online summer book club. I’m supposed to be taking the summer off but last year’s discussion of Influencer: The Power to Change Anything was so much fun that I can’t resist doing it again…
This year’s reading for the CASTLE summer book club will be Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for Your Classroom. The author is Dr. Daniel Willingham, Professor of Psychology at The University of Virginia.
Getting started
Commitments
Schedule
This offer is open to all leaders and change agents, at whatever level they’re operating (hint: this might be a good summer activity for some of your local principals or superintendents!).
I’m looking forward to some interesting discussions. Hope some of you will join me this summer!
Related posts
Thanks to instructions from the kind folks at Mashable, this blog is now available in a Kindle edition. I think you now have at least four different ways to connect with Dangerously Irrelevant: going to the web site, RSS, e-mail, and Kindle. Just trying to create a variety of options for you…
Happy reading!
A learning institute in Manchester, New Hampshire in July. Well, Manchester routinely appears on lists of best places to live. It’s in New England, which will be all green and lovely that time of year. AWESOME.
And the conference is hosted by Dr. Gary Stager, so I know it will be thought-provoking and brain-stimulating. DOUBLY AWESOME.
And the featured faculty will include Deborah Meier, Herb Kohl, Sylvia Martinez, John Stetson, and others. And attendees get a free copy of Kohl’s new book if they sign up by June 5. And there will be an evening reception at the famed FableVision Studios as well as a night out in Boston. TRIPLY, QUADRUPLY, and QUINTUPLY AWESOME.
Yep, sounds like a winner to me!
If you’d like to know what a good statewide 21st century school leadership development program looks like, have we got a podcast for you!
This morning we had Episode 6 of 4 Guys Talking, the ‘talk radio’ podcast series from CASTLE. We spent the first 40 minutes talking with Chuck Heinlein, Director of the Leadership Center for 21st Century Schools at the West Virginia Department of Education.
I think this was one of our best podcasts to date. Chuck shared a wealth of information about the statewide principal institutes that he’s running, and we learned a ton about the legislative supports, Department of Education commitments, funding and policy mechanisms, and other supports that are in place in the state. I have the sense that West Virginia really is trying very hard to move its schools (and its school leaders) forward in a thoughtful, progressive, sustainable manner.
You can download the podcast or listen to a Web-streamed version here:
You also can subscribe to the 4 Guys Talking feed using iTunes or a RSS reader.
Thanks to those of you who joined us live. I’m not sure when our next episodes will be but I will blog about them when I know. Happy listening!
Update: I deleted the embedded BlogTalkRadio player that used to be in this post. Since it started playing automatically, I thought it was too annoying!
Chuck Heinlein, Director of the Leadership Center for 21st Century Schools at the West Virginia Department of Education, will be our guest tomorrow on the 4 Guys Talking podcast. Chuck has an incredible job. Over the past few years he has run hundreds of administrators in his state through year-long institutes on 21st century schooling. As far as I can tell, West Virginia is far ahead of other states when it comes to investing in a statewide model for 21st century leadership development.
You can join us and Chuck on May 26, 1pm Central, for the live podcast. Feel free to call in and join the conversation yourself and/or help us brainstorm some questions for Chuck beforehand. The podcast also will be available for download afterward. Thanks!
Continuing the theme of my last post, how great would it be if every school, district, or university Twitter feed was in one place? The aggregated posts would give us a sense of what each level of schooling thought was worth publicizing. I’m guessing that we’d also discover lots of interesting information that is typicallly hidden from the view of most of us…
After a recent presentation here in Iowa that included some discussion of Twitter, a superintendent came up to me and said, “Okay, I’m in. But how will I find people that I want to follow?” That fantastic question led me to create the Iowa Administrators group at Twibes:
While I was at it, I also created the Iowa Teachers group at Twibes:
Shari Barnhart, Technology Coordinator for the Oskaloosa Schools, then created the Iowa Technology Coordinators group at Twibes:
So what we have here is a burgeoning effort to create spaces where Iowa educators can find others in the state who are on Twitter, see what they’re saying, and sign up to follow them. Maybe there’s a better way to do this but for now I think this has some promise, particularly if folks are willing to sign up and pass this along to others. I believe there are some great conversation and resource-sharing possibilities if most of the Iowa educators on Twitter are following each other.
I’m getting excited for NECC 2009. Just a few more weeks and I’ll be griping about the hot, muggy weather in my hometown of Washington, D.C. I can’t wait!
Those of you who attended Edubloggercon last year may remember that I brought a bunch of buttons for attendees. This year, after consulting with Steve Hargadon and Anita McAnear at ISTE, I decided to spend some CASTLE funds to purchase name badge ribbons. You can see mockups below. The white one will be left-justified, not centered, and I’ll bring Sharpies so that folks can write in their Twitter name. The green and white ribbons will be available at Edubloggercon. Whatever’s left over will be put with the blue ribbons in the NECC Unplugged lounge. First come, first serve. Hope to see you there!
Here’s how we’re doing at collectively creating a list of model 21st century schools that are doing a nice job of infusing 21st century skills, digital technologies, problem- or inquiry-based learning, and other innovative practices into their school organization:
Those 59 United States schools represent 26 states. The International schools are in 10 different countries.
So we’re making GREAT progress. However, we still have a number of states (and countries) that don’t have a single school organization listed. I know that there are schools in every state that are doing wonderful things in the areas of problem-based learning, 21st century skills, or technology integration. Would you help us identify more model schools, either by adding them yourself or passing this quest along to others? We are in desperate need of good models that educators can learn from and visit. Thanks!
Associate Professor & Director, CASTLE, Iowa State University.
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