K12Online Presentation by Scott McLeod on Disruptive Innovation

Leading the Change: Current leadership models are inadequate for disruptive innovations - In this session from the K12Online conference Dr. Scott McLeod explains the concepts Clayton Christensen puts forth in his books, The Innovator's Dilema and Disrupting Class. Whether you read Christensen's books or watch McLeod's presentation the concept of disruptive innovation and how it impacts education is a must read/see/hear for everyone involved in our profession.

Building Your Own Personal Learning Network

This year at TIES I will be presenting a Sunday workshop on building a personal learning network. I created a 15 minute video for that session that I thought I would share with you as it directly addresses and nicely summarizes what we have been doing in our group with our personal learning networks. This is also a video you can take with you to your colleagues to introduce them to the concept of PLNs.

Enjoy!


Building Your Own Personal Learning Network from Carl Anderson on Vimeo.

Open Source & Education

I came across this panel discussion of education fellows today at Pop!Tech. Fascinating and powerful discussion regarding open source principles in education and education reform.

@ Yahoo! Video

At the end of this video a question is asked, "With all of this technology, what is lost?" What are your thoughts?

pride is the driving force

Over at Meandering, our colleague Mr. Martin writes about launching an exciting vodcasting project with his students. Every day, they're filming, editing, and publishing a new Word of the Day as a class vodcast. Parents can view each day's vodcast (vocabcast?) on the class homeroom website; or they can subscribe as they would to any other podcast. Families can discuss the daily word over the dinner table. Parents, take heed: You may need to set an extra place at the dinner table for any Hollywood agents that come knocking. These kids are budding stars of the Neo Lexica Cinema movement.

Podcast via kwout

The prospect of seeing their work published to the world can be a powerful motivator and point of engagement for students. As Mr. Martin notes in his reflection,

Pride is the driving force of this project. When I first introduced it. . . they were glued from the moment I mentioned they would be published on the web!

That's not to say there aren't challenges, both logistical (sustaining and streamlining the vodcast creation process) and colleagial (helping neighboring teachers find time, motivation, and resources to try the same project with their students). Mr. Martin is already thinking about these issues.

None of these resources are at my fingertips at school so how am I suppose to
share this fantastic process with other teachers?

What suggestions do you have for making "this fantastic process" accessible and practical?

podcast about podcasting

We just can't resist the meta-references.

Just as Carl earlier posted a "screencast about screencasting" based on his October 25 breakout session, I've posted an audio recording of the same day's session on podcasting---a podcast about podcasting, if we don't mind stretching the technical definition. It's posted as an attachment on the October 25 agenda page on the NEMEN Technology Leaders site. Click here to listen. Session notes can be viewed here.

You can also find (and add to) an extensive list of podcasting resources at the Hamline Podcasting 101 wiki, a site developed as a companion to Hamline's podcasting course.

Finally, no discussion of podcasting in education is complete without mentioning Dan Schmit and his excellent book, KidCast: Podcasting in the Classroom . If you're just getting started with podcasting and looking for practical curriculum integration ideas and easy-to-understand technical help in equal parts, look no further than KidCast. And don't miss Dan's KidCast blog and podcast.

Intelligenic via kwout

letters to the next president

Scott McLeod of Dangerously Irrelevant posted about Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future, a project between Google and the National Writing Project.

We invited young people to write about the issues and concerns that they feel are central to their future, issues they would hope our next president would act on. Topics were chosen by the students themselves to reflect their specific personal, regional, and age-related interests. Teachers and mentors guided students through the process of writing a persuasive letter or essay to the presidential candidates using Google Docs.

Some of you may already be turned on to this project and encouraging your students to craft letters. Scott ups the ante with an open invitation to edubloggers to pen and post their own letters. A perfect time to model civic engagement and thought leadership? Absolutely.

If you're still pondering ideas for that first blog post, or casting around for what to write about next, here's your golden writing opportunity. Add your voice to the conversation. If you're talking about the election with your students, writing a letter to the next president is a pretty shiny teaching opportunity, too.

Scott suggests labeling your blog post with this Technorati tag: educationletters08 . To follow the "Letters to the Next President" posts composed by other edubloggers, either click on this educationletters08 link or visit Technorati and enter "educationletters08" in the search bar.

Check out the edublogger letters posted so far.

educationletters08: Blogs, Photos, Videos and more on Technorati via kwout

How Has Technology Impacted This Election?

I too have been playing around with Flowgram this week. I created the following Flowgram initially for the teachers at Goodhue but thought this group might be interested in it as well.



If you double click on the Flowgram it will open it in full-screen mode. There the websites I visit in the flowgram are live and clickable.