How did this panel discussion originate?

On Monday, September 17, 2007, Google launched the Google Presentation web application to their suite of services. News of this new service spread quickly through the blogosphere and Twitter and soon more than fifty different people made over 500 edits in a twenty-four hour period to one Google presentation. Since introduced, this presentation has been used by hundreds of people to begin conversations centered on free online tools used to weave a web of connections between people around the world.

As a result of this transformational experience, educators begin discussing the importance of sharing the changing nature of professional development and documentation of best practices in VIRAL professional development. The proposal was written in Google docs and since acceptance, an expanded group of educators around the world has used a wiki, elluminate, and a variety of tools to bring a collaborative, immersive viral PD experience to NECC and to people around the world.

Presenters
Vicki Davis, moderator
Darren Draper
Kelly Dumont
Kristen Hokanson
Robin Ellis
Ryan Bretag
Beth Ritter-Guth
Carolyn Foote

Backchannel Presenters/ Moderators
John Maklary
Stephanie Sandifer

How can you participate?

At 1:30pm CDT on July 2, we will be participating in a NECC panel discussion that centers on the power of the network. During our presentation we hope to demonstrate to all those attending our session in person (and virtually), just how powerful global collaboration can be. Hence, we are asking for your participation in our presentation as well.

1) Join our Ustream

We will be streaming the presentation live on the Open PD Ustream channel at 1:30 pm CDT on July 2nd. You may watch here and participate in the conversation (and even ask the panelists questions).

2) Leave a comment on our voicethread

One way that you can participate now is by adding your voice to the VoiceThread below. Please take a few minutes and add your thoughts about the different tools depicted through images in the thread. We would truly like as many voices possible, offering a wide range of thought on the usefulness of the common tools we all use in our collaborations.

How do you use these tools? How are they important to your professional development? Please add your voice.

3) Join the conversation on the NECC Educational networking site

We’ve created a discussion thread to converse on this panel discussion at the NECC educational networking site.

Follow our most recent announcements.

All announcements and events pertaining to this session will be announced at the Walls Came Down wiki.

• Jenny Luca recently wrote a post on PLN’s and balance great, worth reading
• Sue Wyatt as known as tasteach her blog on Smartboards and a classroom blog
• Joe Dale Integrating ICT into MFL classroom
• Kevin Honeycutt – Driving Questions as well as his blog The “Rest Area”
• Sarah Stewart Sarah’s Musings
• Mr. Plough The Next Step
• Carolynn Bruton Carbru’s
• Mrs.Durff Writing a Blog Post and Classroom blog
• Kimberly McClain Terrible Teacher

Thank you all for making another session of OpenPD so worthwhile, I learned a great deal once again. I am grateful for the true sense of collaboration, and sharing everyone brings with them to class, what we are able to learn from one another is phenomenal. This is a wonderful experience for me. Sue thank you for all of your wonderful contributions to this class as well as your work in the edublogger world. On the wiki we do have an assignment for this coming week, look at and respond to 4 other blogs we have some listed on the participants page as well. Also to set up a blog at Edublogs so you are ready to start. Hope to see you all again next week.

Darren Draper and I lead a session in the morning called OpenPD based on the online class we teach. The class is an introduction to using social software in the classroom and we use social software to teach it. We had a room full of people interested in professional development, interested in best practices involved in providing it, wonderful conversation flowed regarding successes and challenges we all face. If you are interested here is a link to the archived Ustream broadcast of our session. Be patient, it takes a bit to download and the audio doesn’t begin for the first 15 minutes. In talking about new tools for teachers and students, new levels of comfort, shifts in thinking, we model the use of the tools we talk about with those who attend. We believe we’re on to something here, and invite all of you to come and participate with us as we learn best practices in teaching how to use social software in the classroom.

I read many great blogs written by educational leaders passionate about the education of the world’s youth. I continue to struggle with my own blog in light of those I read, wondering at times what I have to offer, and if this is really something I am cut out to do. I am going to persevere in 2008 to help clarify my thoughts as I begin a new year with an entirely new administration (5 top positions) in my district. I have felt stagnant since summer, but now the people are in place and my hopes are I will have the opportunity to share what I have learned in the past year from my network and we will truly begin to embed collaborative tools into classroom practices. This will be a challenge for me, the new administration believes in the use of technology for data collection, using the data to drive instruction, not necessarily using technology to make global connections or work in collaboration classroom to classroom, teacher to teacher.
I am looking at it as a new day, a new opportunity and hopefully along the way some of my reflections of what are taking place in my position will be helpful to someone else. I wish you all a healthy peaceful 2008!

I also want to express my gratitude to Darren for being willing to take that leap in asking anyone reading his blog to share in the teaching and participate with him in an open professional development session. I learned a great deal from him and with him; he is a wonderful example of one who truly does believe in collaboration. He has written a great post on his blog about our last session, please follow the link and take a look. We have plans to hold another class during the winter; we will let you know when we have the dates set.

Update: How does anyone else do this, how do you decide what has merit to introduce as tools you feel has value, what process do you go through? I am looking for help, suggestions, models to follow, you see in my district I do not have anyone else to bounce these ideas off of and feel at times at a loss for what direction to take. Thanks for your help!

The morning started off with David Warlick’s keynote from the K-12 Online Conference at 8:00AM EDT. The time spent today on my own professional development, while sitting at my desk, in my office was quite amazing. Not only the technology that made it all possible, but also the shear number of people participating in the conversations surrounding the keynote, all of us connected by invisible threads through our social networks. People who have never met face to face, yet interact as if old friends through blogs, twitter, edubloggerworld, classroom2.0 just to name a few. To many of us the content of the keynote is not new, things we have all been talking about and struggling with in terms of what has to change in the educational system to reach our students, to prepare them for their future which we cannot predict. For me the presentation was somewhat disjointed, I understand what he was trying to show but all the moving from one place to another did not add anything for me.

Today David spoke of how the walls in education are coming down, with the use of the available technologies, the building of networks for student use as well as our own. Our children have to be able to participate in world connected through online networks, communities, something they already do well on their own time and something we as educators need to bring into our classrooms. Our children understand how to remain connected through their conversations, it is who they are, how they interact, what they have grown up with. David said we must change our teaching strategies to reach our students as the people they are, rather than the people we want them to be. How we teach, how we learn, the way we live is and has changed, schools must change as well if we believe we are preparing students for life. I still find so much resistance to change the way information is presented to students, to use new tools in the classroom, for adults to want to learn how to use the tools through which our children are engaged. Here are three things mentioned in the keynote this morning, we should be aware of them each day and find a way to incorporate them into our teaching and learning.

• Students are information savvy, but not tech savvy, they don’t know how to work the information they have and find. There is energy in their confidence we need to harness the energy and allow them to share information, form communities and give them a place to safely make mistakes.
• There is a new information landscape and it is participatory, it connects, it flows. We must learn to participate, to create experiences with and for our students
• The future is unpredictable one we cannot describe, the best thing we can do today is teach our children, our students how to teach themselves, to learn, unlearn and relearn.

still a couple of glitches with technology, but compared to the week before things worked smoothly. We had a some additional people join us which was great, our conversations were very good and it was another step in building a new community of learners for all of us.