Lani and I gave an overview of K12 Online from the perspective of developing personal learning networks. Lani made most of the slides, here they are:

There was a lively chat going on throughout our talk, which I think was the best part of the whole thing. The Discovery Educator Network hosts Webinars (seminars on the web) using WebEx software which supports a chat window for participants to talk to each other during the presentation and ask questions of the presenters. At the same time David Jakes was hosting a chatcast in skype and some folks (there were 50 people in the room at one point) were continuing the discussion over on twitter. Talk about your web 2.0 globally connected goodness! ;-)

We've also archived the presentation and various links and resources we discussed on the K12 Online 2007 Take Away Wiki. I captured the chat from the WebEx environment and archived it there. If anyone grabbed the skype chat please send it my way or drop it into the wiki yourself.

We also published a version of the presentation on Google's latest addition to the Google Docs suite, Presently (online collaborative presentation tool). While there are a number of bugs, or inconveniences, that need to be worked out of Presently (downloading a copy to your hard drive isn't straight forward, customizing slides background colour with a colour picker tool, live chat while two or more people collaborate on the doc are all features that need some improvement) it does have one very nice feature. When a presentation is published and simultaneously viewed by more than one person, live chat is automatically enabled. I hope the chat can be copied and saved, or perhaps just archived in a user's gmail account, but I really like the idea of a presentation with life after the presentation. If you head over there now, and someone else is watching it at the same time, you can chat with each other about it; live.

During the presentation I talked briefly about how using free online tools allows us control over time and space that we didn't have before. Learning can be shifted to any convenient time or space. With the the chat feature of Google Docs' new presentation tool, chatcasts can continue to be made, spontaneously. I hope if anyone does that they add the chats they create to the archive we've begun on the wiki.

This all turns around what I think are the emerging pedagogies related to teaching and learning with read/write web tools:

• » Make thinking transparent.


• » Publish artifacts of learning, particularly thoughts in the rough; we learn most from our mistakes.


• » Create content and share it with the goal of educating others.


• » Use tools that allow for shifting time and space for learning; facilitate "just in time" learning.


• » ...

What underlying pedagogical principles to teaching with the read/write web would you add to this list?

Update


I just checked out the google docs chat feature in Presently. The chat text cannot be selected, copied or saved. That's not good. Another inconvenience that needs to be improved. ;-)

Lani Ritter-Hall and I are doing a Webinar (seminar on the web) for the Discovery Educator Network. The topic is about K12 Online 2007 and building professional learning networks.

Last Tuesday we started putting our presentation together. Lani lives in Ohio, one time zone to the east of me. We really wanted to use an online slideshow/presentation tool that would allow us to build the document live; collaboratively. Today, Google announced the addition of a presentation tool to it's suite of online Google Docs. It has a chat feature built in too so you can share the url of your presentation, add audio using Google Talk and chat live while you take people through your presentation wherever they are in the world. There's even a Google Docs in Plain English video that was published on YouTube last week.

This year I'm encouraging all the teachers in my department to begin looking at ways to incorporate educational technology in their daily teaching. As a first step, I'm publishing various short instructional videos (< 5 min each) to our departmental wiki once each two weeks. We started with Social Bookmarking in Plain English. Today I added this ...

They are called The Global Learners. A group of about 26 teachers from across the Adams County School District #14 in Denver. The brainchild of Joe Miller supported by the technical and pedagogical expertise of Dave Tarwater. They are teachers who teach grades 1 through 12 (students aged 6 years to 18+). Each one has a modern laptop with wireless capability, a SMARTBoard, broad access to the internet from their classrooms and the unreserved support of their Director of Assessment and Educational Technology (Joe Miller).

Joe emailed me in March of this year asking if I might be able to come to Denver some time in August. Five months later I found myself in Denver working with this exceptional group of teachers. If you want to see some real read/write web goodness in the classroom scan through some of the posts in their professional group blog Global Learner (isn't that a great name for a teacher group blog?). Then click on their names in the contributors list and see some of the amazing work they are doing with their kids and sharing with the world.

Almost from the moment I met him, Joe did something that really impressed me and set the tone for the three days I was there. I told Joe that I wanted to chatcast every presentation over the two days I would be working with the teachers. We needed to have access to skype in order to do this. Skype was blocked in his district. Joe called the person responsible for opening up skype on the district network. The reply was: "I'll try to get that done." Joe got off the phone and told me what the other fellow had said, and added: "I don't like that answer. I want it done. I'll call him back in an hour and we'll have it done today."

I invited people on my twitter network to join in the chatcasting fun. Terry Freedman (London, England) agreed to "Captain" (coordinate everyone joining the chat in skype and model best practices) the chatcast. We were also joined by Bud Hunt (Littleton, Colorado, US), Claudia Ceraso (Buenos Aires, Agentina), David Jakes (Naperville, Illinois, US), Sharon Peters (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), Jan Stearns (Los Angeles, California, US), Darren Draper (Salt Lake City, Utah, US), Jose Rodriguez (Los Angeles, California, US), Lisa Durff, Hagerstown, Maryland, US), Vince Jansen (Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada), Joyce Valenza (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US) and all the ACSD14 Global Learners. I can't thank you all enough for helping me model how easily we can bring a world of experts and expertise into our classrooms on a daily basis. A special shout out goes to Kathy Cassidy (Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada). One of the grade one teachers was talking to me about scaling the practices I was modeling for her students. I told her about Kathy's work and showed her Kathy's website. I suggested she email Kathy to ask her questions directly. Within 30 minutes she had contacted Kathy, received an answer, and had a skype conference call set up for a small group of the Global Learners with Kathy.

I had a twitter "aha!" moment during my time in Denver. One of the teachers was telling me about how he had used logo in the classroom some years ago. I told them logo has evolved into a new type of programming based on lego ... I couldn't remember the name; only that it began with the letter "s" and it wasn't skitch. I tweeted what I was looking for. Less than 60 seconds passed before Chris Lehmann tweeted back that I was looking for scratch. I tried to model the value of twitter by having a screen running throughout the two days at the side of the room displaying my twitter network using twittercamp. As a result of all this twittering goodness several of the Global Learners have joined the twitter community as well.

Another best practice that was, incidentally, modeled by all this was the generosity that characterizes the community of edubloggers. Several people shared their contact information on the wiki and left comments to the Global Learners about what we were learning together. Again, thank you all.

The teachers of ACSD14 are actively pursuing ways in which the many tools available for learning on the internet can positively impact the learning of the students in their classrooms. And they're not shy about pushing back if they think something is all fluff. Below are all the presentations I gave at the conference and where audio had been recorded I've made slidecasts. Listen to the audio about 90 seconds through slide #39 of "What Can I Do Now That I Couldn't Do Before?" One of the Global Learners got a little put off and pushed back a bit. We talked more at the break. We shook hands and smiled before I left Denver. ;-)

Everything (slides, video, slidecasts, chatcasts and participant reflections) is archived on the Adams County School District #14 PD Wiki. Here are the slides and slidecasts of the presentations I gave.

Tear Down the Walls.


An introduction to the two days of workshops.

Learning The Guitar or thinking about innovation in education.


A guide to thinking about using online tools in pedagogically meaningful ways with a focus on blogging.

Rip. Mix. Learn.


Another metaphor to pin pedagogical thinking on; a brief introduction to the K12 Online Conference with pointers to archived materials from last year's conference followed by participants free wheeling learning on the topic of their interest.

What Can I Do Now That I Couldn't Do Before?


Using two concrete examples (flickr and pbwiki) of using free online tools to create meaningful learning activities we discuss ways to extrapolate this kind of pedagogical thinking to any online tool.

Developing Expert Voices


Mashing up several online tools to create an assessment project that allows students to really demonstrate what they have learned. With a little creative thinking this model can be scaled across domains and age levels.

This is another test. Last year several of my students asked how they could embed flickr slideshows in their blog posts. This was dead simple and visually attractive. The photos are from my flickr account tagged summer07. They were taken in Squamish, Whistler, Mt. Hood, Seattle and Banff.

Click on the picture to advance the images or select one from the thumbnails below.

If you like this tool check out Pictobrowser.

I'm doing a presentation for Barbara Bareda's school today via skype. These are the slides I'll be using. They're here for the folks there to follow along with during my talk. Links are embeded directly into the slides. I'll record my end of the audio with audacity and turn it into a slidecast afterwards.

Full screen version.

I've been back from Denver for almost two weeks just haven't found time to blog about it all yet. It was a great experience ... but more about that later.

I had lunch with Chris Harbeck today. We talked about lots of things. He says I think too much before I write. That's why I write so little. He's probably right. Anyway, we also talked about a new site called Animoto. I'm just playing with this and decided to slap together a teaser of some of the content generated at the workshops I gave before posting it here.

Over at Animoto you select at least 10 pictures (jpg images), follow the dead simple instructions on screen to select CC music from a large list and Wham! Instant music video. Don't even need to add water.

More stuff from Denver coming soon.

Thanks for the push Chris! ;-)

I've been invited to Denver to do a couple of days of workshops with a group of teachers in the Adams County School District #14. I'm leading the workshops over the next two days.

Following my experiences at BLC with chatcasting I'm going to try to leverage what I've learned and weave it into the talks I'm giving. I'd like to see if we can push the envelope of what was done at BLC. You're all invited to participate. Here's what I'm thinking:

Chatcasting: Extending Professional Development Through Time and Space

Every session will be chatcasted in skype. I'm going to be teaching folks to chatcast as the intro to the 2 days I'll be working with them. Terry Freedman has agreed to act as one of the "Captains" of this venture. (Thanks Terry!) If you join us, you can be a Captain too. The Captain's Job is to welcome people into the chat and act as "rudder" to keep them focused on what's going on in the presentation. Since you won't be there live, asking participants things like: "What's he saying now?" is a good way to keep them focused on the content of the presentation and to provide opportunities to challenge or elaborate on the ideas I'll be sharing. I hope to see folks playing with the ideas and pushing back a little.

The plan is to take the chatcast and dump it into a wiki. I'll send them away at the end of the day with homework:

    i Reread the chatcast.

    ii Insert questions you still have about the content.

    iii Reorganize it in any way you like, or create lists, to highlight the "big ideas" and what the "take aways" were. i.e. What was learned? What do you want to know more about?

If you're available it would be a great way to concretely illustrate how easily these tools can bring the world into the classroom.

I think the main power inherent in web 2.0 tools is the ability they give us to play fast and loose with time and space. I'm hoping this will provide a means by which the conversations we start tomorrow will extend beyond Friday and perhaps spill over into a few classrooms here in Denver.

A Bit More About The Mechanics

TwitterCamp will be running on a projector off at the side of the room. (I've already tested it out. It'll work this time.) I hope to shout out to my twitter network and have them shout back. This will model some of my ideas about using twitter in the classroom.

You only need skype to make this work. Have your twitter window open if you like but the main stage will be on skype.

If you plan to join us (at about 9:30am North American Mountain Time) search Terry Freedman on skype and request to be a contact. He'll add you into the group chat.

I'll be teaching other people in the room how to do the same so that we distribute the load across more than one person and they will teach someone and so on. Hopefully, we can sustain the methodology in future sessions independently although you're welcome to join any of those as well.

Again, you will be the "rudder" through the first chat (with any other edubloggers that join us) and I will use your "conduct" as a model for how the participants should do it themselves in the later sessions. That is, if you want to come along for the ride. ;-)

You can see the agenda on the wiki. I'll be adding to it tonight and over the next two days.

So, what do you think? Any takers? ;-)

UPDATE


David Jakes, the creator of the chatcast phenonmenon, confirmed he will be live in the chat tomorrow morning. This party is starting to shape up. ;-)