Online Conferences

For those searching for some professional development, but don't have the funds to travel, there are two online educator conferences that will be starting up.

Global Education Conference - November 15-19, 2010
http://www.globaleducationconference.com
Twitter: @globaledcon, hashtag #GlobalEd10
Global Education Conference Facebook page


The Global Education Conference, kicking off its inaugural year, is designed to be collaborative and world-wide community effort to provide opportunities and instruction in globally-connected education activities and initiatives. As they clarify on their site, it is not simply a global conference on general education topics. The emphasis is on globally-connected education - ways to stretch your teaching and learning outside of the classroom and around the globe.

The conference will have sessions presented 24 hours a day - live events are scheduled according to the presenter's local day and timezone; all sessions will be recorded for on-demand playback at another time. The conference will also have sessions in multiple languages.

More about the actual sessions offered will be forthcoming - presentation applications are being accepted through the end of October.

K12 Online Conference - October 18-29, 2010
http://k12onlineconference.org
Twitter: hashtag #k12online10
K12 Online Conference Facebook page

The K12 Online Conference, online since 2006, is a two-week online conference covering a wide array of general education topics, usually with particular focus on integrating emerging technologies. There is no charge for the conference, and it is open to anyone to attend or to present. The conference uses several different platforms to disseminate information: a blog for news and announcements, a wiki for conference guidelines, and a Ning network for the actual conference content.

Online conferences, you say? As far as professional development goes, it's a bit of a foreign concept to some:

• I think most schools like to keep training in-house to tailor it to their local needs.
• The educators who would be most likely to attend a conference virtually would be those early-adopters and technology-savvy teachers who might also be less likely to actually need it.
• So many teachers are comfortable with the face-to-face nature of current offerings that the online delivery method takes some getting used to - it doesn't feel legitimate.
• It may also actually not be seen as legitimate in the eyes of administrators - how can you track how much someone is participating in an online conference?

Between the economy, the continuing increase of technology in schools, and the increasing nature of educators needing to be more "global" in scope, online conferences will start to gain more popularity over the next decade - hopefully sooner. Many school systems should have measures in place to allow teachers to document their own learning in settings outside of official system-delivered professional development, and these types of conferences are perfect for that. (The K12 Online Conference site even has a section of its wiki to help walk educators through that process.)

Check out one or both of the conferences. They're free, they're online, and they're accessible anywhere and anytime.

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Building a New Box

Over the past couple of weeks - I think probably starting with the news that the NBC networks were going to launch their Education Nation initiative - the idea of school reform has been on my mind a lot. I've had water-cooler conversations with several teachers which drifted into the realm of "what's-wrong-and-what-would-work" and a couple of articles have come through my inbox along the same vein.

So I decided to start blogging about that, too. Building a New Box is my new school reform blog - not so much an authority on the matter, but simply collecting information and opinions from various sources, and providing some of my own.

The title? Well, you've probably heard the phrase thinking outside the box. But what happens if just being outside the box isn't enough? What if you need a completely new box?

I'm only two posts into it, but please add it to your RSS reader and stay tuned - I'm hoping it'll be part of the larger discussion about education reform in this country.

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