How You Can Be Involved in my ACEC Presentations This Week

(Apart from what follows below, also see /2010/04/teachers-recount-your-journey.html for another way you can participate!) 

In all four of my presentations at ACEC this week I have put measures in place to make the sessions:

1. Fully accessible for anyone in the world, even if they are not attending.  

2. Interactive and collaborative.

For each presentation I will publish a blog post right here at www.happysteve.com which will include:

A link to a live video broadcast of the presentation. (It is possible this won't work but I have had complete success at other conferences)

A basic summary of the information delivered, especially useful links and also an "ACTION LIST" of things you can do immediately to get started on replicating the ideas I mention.

An interactive chat system, so you can discuss what you are hearing with the people who are right there in the room with me. 

An 'etherpad' collaborative document, so that both virtual and physical attendees can add THEIR wisdom, experiences, and knowledge to my presentation.

My hope is that by taking these measures, I can avoid the 'active speaker/passive participants' syndrome, and make the presentations a launching pad for sharing, conversation, networking, individual research, and DO IT NOW actions... because I can't stand the irony of presenting on NEW PEDAGOGY using OLD PEDAGOGY!

These posts will appear about 30 minutes before each presentation

-------> right here at happysteve.com <------

The links below are conference summaries and time information only. Check back at happysteve.com for the video, chat system, etc. Oh you could also subscribe (see right margin of website) to have the posts delivered to your inbox.

Wednesday 7th April, 10.30am 3D Virtual Worlds: One School's Journey UNIVERSAL TIME ZONE CALCULATION

Wednesday 7th April, 4.40pm Run a School Internet Radio Station UNIVERSAL TIME ZONE CALCULATION

Friday 9th April, 11.00am Moodle Your Mad Mind to the Max UNIVERSAL TIME ZONE CALCULATION

Friday 9th April, 1.55pm Professional Development and the Web UNIVERSAL TIME ZONE CALCULATION

PS

ACEC Presentation: Run a School Internet Radio Station

This is my post for a conference presentation at the ACEC conference in Melbourne. There SHOULD be a a video stream you can watch here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/technology-in-education-show

Check here for the timing of the presentation: Wednesday 7th April, 4.40pm Run a School Internet Radio Station UNIVERSAL TIME ZONE CALCULATION

Below you will find a list of actions to take, a link to an 'etherpad' where you can add your own links and other insights, an embedded version of my presentation, a voicethread to comment on, and finally an embedded chat system for use during the session.

SOME ACTIONS TO TAKE DURING PRESENTATION (OR AFTERWARDS):

Explore the links in this post, text chat with attendees & virtual attendees.

Leave a comment on this blog post giving your perspective or story, or introducing yourself.

Connect with me! Subscribe to my blog using the link in the right margin, or send me a twitter message to @steve_collis, or come visit my school: http://scil.nsw.edu.au/pd/ Also I am running a free online seminar myself in a few days. Please email me at scollis then the @ sign, then nbcs.nsw.edu.au to get an invite.

Click here and add to the resources contributed by others related to this presentation: http://ietherpad.com/audiointeaching

Download 'Audacity' for free from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ and start playing! 

On the broader topic of 'student publishing' check out: www.realaudienceproject.com  - a work in progress, but this is basically a portal to all our student publishing projects... check out the LuLu book publishing project in particular.

Visit http://radio.setnine.com/  and get your own radio station running right now!

Listen to our radio station - open this link in iTunes: http://209.119.13.39:11300/listen.pls

Listen to our FrenchFM youtube channel: http://youtube.com/frenchfm

Also, here is my intro for the conference presentation on our school internet radio station. Most of the presentation will be a practical demonstration - we'll actually put together our own radio content - but I'll start off running through the basic process of setting a station up (which is quite straightforward). Press the RIGHT PLAY BUTTON to advance through the presentation:

 

I will refer to a VoiceThread - leave a comment to say what you think about this Quad burger!

Here is the live chat system for the presentation. If you tweet, use the hashtag 'acecradio' so the comment is included: 

Teachers - Recount Your Journey

Hello everyone! I am presenting on the topic "Professional Development and the Web" at the ACEC conference this Friday. I want to present some testimonials from teachers who have found that engaging with colleagues online via blogging, Twitter, online conferences, etc, has had a profound impact on them.

I guess I am looking for teachers who would be able to say:

"Engaging with other educators online has changed everything for me."

If this is you, could you please respond to this post with a comment recounting your journey? Can you tell how engaging with other educators online has affected your morale, perspective, energy levels, motivation, career opportunities, or anything else?

You may have just discovered Twitter. Or perhaps you were there from the start. Perhaps you don't tweet but you blog. Perhaps you don't blog but you tweet. When did your journey begin? How has it affected you? What makes the difference? What next...? 

In particular, could you make some sort of comment about whether the benefits you have had from being part of the online conversation have flowed on to your students, and in what way? 

Recount your journey.

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/john/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

In the presentation I will show some of the recounts, but also invite participants to read all comments for themselves. Other visitors to this post can read your experiences and post their own.

What Visitors Notice About My School

We have regular groups of visitors to our school, especially this year. (Click here to visit yourself)

Just recently a group of educators from New Zealand, lead by Sue Ashworth and Mandy Dempsey spent the day with us. They sent this letter to us afterwards: (reproduced here with permission).

Click here to download letter, or read on...

Let me quote some bits of it:

 

What a lovely thing to say! 

That's why I stay in my job and have no intention of leaving!

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They quote an unofficial school motto "Do, then think!":

This is why our school has changed so much since I joined 8 years ago. We take action NOW, and if it gets messy, it gets messy. We are not living in an age when you can afford to pause. We pause and reflect AFTER the fact, and make tactical corrections. No time for caution!

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I was delighted to read this:

Exactly! Like I wrote about recently: It's not about the technology.

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Yes! Because it is all about the students!  The whole point of visiting my school is to talk to the students - see them in the process of learning. 

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Yes this is very much a brag blog post, but not about me, about my school. Come and see - we'd love to have you visit.

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Let me finish with this tweet from Chris Betcher after he visited with a colleague last Friday:

 

"Professional Development Like No Other"

UPDATE: We're also offering 'taster' visits to our school. Come for a couple of hours and get a feel for what we're doing. Contact @anneknock (aknock @ nbcs.nsw.edu.au). Now on with the show: 

A dream of mine going back years has finally come to fruition!

My school is launching, no HAS LAUNCHED a professional development academy! We even have accreditation from the NSW Institute of Teachers so it's official!

Before I go further, here are the details, dates, and rego forms: Download SCIL PD Schedule 2010

COME YE COME YE! Come one, come all! Our vision: PD LIKE NO OTHER! 

I personally taken the 'best stuff' from everything I've been working on for the past three years - virtual worlds, Beyond Borders collaborative student networks, and the 'Real Audience Project' (students publishing to the web, publishing their own print books, publishing a live internet radio station) and will be running full day workshops once a fortnight from next term through to the end of the year! All the stuff I blog about, I can now work with you, hands-on!

We're also running courses on using Moodle (We know how to use Moodle in ways that work. We adopted Moodle back in 2005 and almost all our teachers are highly proficient with it. We even have a large online study arm of the school http://hsconline.nsw.edu.au/ using Moodle for distance ed. ).

And what we call the "Learning Matrix". Imagine 140 students, 6 teachers, and heaps of computers thrown into one big wall-less learning space where students self-select into activities and take responsibility for their own learning journey. We've been doing this for three years, and the results are astonishing. COME AND SEE! We'll show you how we did it and how you might adopt similar structures. The results have been spectacular, both students AND teachers. "Conflict" is so often the defining feature of a classroom - but not any more, which is why our teachers are delighted, and the students getting on with the job.

  

 

Our vision: Professional development, like no other.

The people running the PD are teachers who are currently implementing the practices they are training. Teachers like me, and my highly esteemed colleagues. Our workshops will be peppered with "last Thursday when we did this, we discovered..."

The PD will involve observation of real classes of students so attendees can see the ideas in action.

The PD will be hands on, and practical from the start of the day, with a clear action plan and timeline in place for you to take away and implement.

The PD will be structured to encourage networking and ideas sharing, based on our common experiences of what it is like at the coalface of teaching, where the loftiest of ideas gets smashed against reality!  

Each workshop day will also be just the beginning a journey, with attendees invited into a support network that continues to touch base, exchange ideas, failures, and triumphs in the following weeks and months. In every workshop we will be promoting the big idea of teaching - it is not a job, not a career, definitely a calling, but on top of that it is a GLOBAL MOVEMENT OF SOCIAL IMPROVEMENT. We are part of something bigger than just our local school. This thought is energising!

As you can see I am very excited by it all.

Please, spread the word about this! And come, come in droves and let's work together!