Future of Education

Today I had the great experience of presenting at the Ohio eTech Conference with my wife. I have presented at conferences before, but this was special. I want to thank her and everyone who attended for making it a great experience for me.

For those of you who attended the session, I hope you enjoyed it. I appologize that we didn’t get to share more ideas for using wikis. All of the great questions guided the session in a direction I didn’t expect. All of the ideas I was going to share are on the website. If  you didn’t attend the session, the website should be a good resource for learning how to use wikis in educational settings. I will also be adding a few more resources to the site when I get back to my building Thursday.

Feel free to let me know what you thought. If you have a wiki, or go out and start one, post the address on here. I would love to see what everyone else is doing with wikis.

One thing I didn’t get to mention at the conference is I have a free 1 year upgrade for pbwiki. The first person to post their pbwiki address on this blog will get the upgrade.

I have been thinking about a way to get the students in my building blogging more and better. I have convinced a few teachers to create blogs where they post a topic or article and the students comment. They are doing this once per nine weeks. Good start, but not truly the idea behind blogging. Here is my first step toward the answer. Maybe it is a coincidence I thought of this the same week the Student 2.0 blog came out and I am writing this after reading David Jakes’ Post The Kids are Alright.

“Many educators want to change education, and have been looking for a way to do that-looking for that next great conversation that will make all the difference. Wouldn’t it be ironic if they’ve created just that, without realizing it, by teaching their third grade class to blog?So if you are someone who wants educational change, look no further. Change is coming, and it will ultimately rise not from us, but from the voice of our very own students.”

My idea is to give my students a voice by: creating a blog, in Moodle (I am using Moodle due to our districts blogging policy). I will post prompts for students to comment on their learning.  I will ask questions such as “how social networks could be used productively in schools?” I may get some junk answers, but the good ones could help us give students the voice they deserve.

Since the blog will be private, I will paste the good post on here once I get it started. It will most likely be in January since we start vacation in one week. Woohoo! Any and all prompts for the students are welcome.

I am getting ready to create an online professional development class for the teachers in my district. It will be worth one semester hour college credit. I am currently trying to figure out what the content of the class will be.  I will be using Moodle to teach the class. In our district we use Moodle for our blogging, wikis, online classes, etc… Last year I taught a class that covered a wide range of topics (Inspiration, blogging, digital photography, photo editing, teacher webpages). It went well, but I want this class to have more of a focus. My thought was to center the class around “using web 2.0 tools in the classroom”My question is, with the numerous tools out there, what is best to focus on? Any opinions would be appreciated.

I will have to use this as my first Twitter question. I finally took the time a few nights ago to create an account. I now have to find a few more people to follow me. If you are a Twitter’er (what is the correct term?) my username is “futureofedu”