I do a lot of work to help teachers and students differentiate and personalize learning. One thing I know about this is that you need A LOT of content to succeed in doing this. Also, mobile technology makes it a lot more feasible.

I also believe that you need a HOME BASE, that is, one central place for all that content to live. This “home base” should be the place where kids know to go everyday to find what they need. (I’ve also found that having this kind of “home base” will prompt students to go and explore areas that may not even be covered in class.) For most schools, this will be a cloud- or network-based place.

There are many options for where this “home base” might be hosted, ranging from something as simple as a foldering system (like Google Drive or even a network drive) to something more complex like a full content management system.

Two important variables in considering the options are:

• Cost  (and by cost, I mean not only whether it is free or how much you pay for it, but also by how easy it is for an individual teacher to use without necessarily having district IT help)
• Student data tracking capabilities (This means the degree to which you can see what students access, how long they spend on it, what assessment results they have, etc. This information is obviously very useful to teachers.)

Using those those two variables, I’ve made this graphic to list out some different options.

What do you think? Is this useful? Are there other big content hosting/organization tools or platforms that are missing?

I’ll be continuing to refine this so I appreciate any input.

Connected Educator month in August affected me deeply.

I consider myself “connected” — I’m on Twitter often; I use other social media tools to collaborate with others; I love online participatory learning. When I have a puzzling problem or a great discovery, I turn immediately to my PLN. Connected Educator month made me reflect on how important these connections are to me and to many others.

But perhaps more importantly, Connected Educator month made me realize what a great disadvantage teachers who are not connected face. I think this is becoming an equity issue for teachers. If you aren’t a part of a strong PLN, you simply don’t have the edge in your professional learning.

I think that professional organizations, state policymakers, and district and building leadership should be pushing this issue. Our teachers and our learners deserve it.

So the challenge for me has been thinking about how I can help more teachers get connected.

One thing I’m doing is helping coordinate a Teacher Boot Camp (hopefully, the first of many) with the specific aim of getting teachers connected. This day is for teachers who aren’t on Twitter, haven’t set up a collaborative Google Doc, don’t know what G+ is, and just haven’t gotten around to setting up a PLN.

This day will be in Portland, Oregon on February 27 and is a part of the NCCE “Make Your Future” summits.

If you know a teacher who might benefit from this, please let them know about it. (We’ve tried to keep the price low at $100 per person.)

And if you’d like to host an event like this in your own community, please do (either yourself or in conjunction with me or others)!

I think that getting more teachers actively connected is one of the most important things we can do.

I’ve been pretty vocal about my view of conferences in the past. They seem to me to be a less than optimal format of professional development, and I feel inauthentic standing up and lecturing (presenting) about not standing up and lecturing in the classroom. In short, I don’t think that most conferences model the kind of professional learning we are striving for.

Another issue I have with ed tech conferences in general is that I think “ed tech” as an isolated area has outlived it’s usefulness. It’s time for technology to be integrated with other instructional pursuits. Having separate staffing, budgets, etc. for technology does not serve our students, in my opinion. (Yes, I know there are other considerations.) That’s why you may have noticed that I’ve been participating in more curriculum conferences and fewer ed tech ones lately.

Still, I believe deeply in technology as a tool to further learning and know that much of that is moved ahead by the “ed tech” agenda.

So this year, I’m doing something about this and trying to broaden the conversation with some innovative new models for professional learning.

At NCCE 2013 in Portland, Oregon, I’m helping to coordinate the “Make Your Future” pre-conference summit on February 27. We’ll have five different summits focused on a full-day of reflection, collaboration, and hands-on time focused on topics of critical importance to educators of all types.

• Leadership summit
  for superintendents, principals, and other school leaders
• Common Core summit
  for curriculum coordinators
• Teacher-librarian summit
  for teacher-librarians
• IT summit
  for information technology directors
• Teacher boot camp
  for teachers who are not “connected” in terms of using social tools for their own professional learning

I hope that these summits begin to build bridges for district and school teams to have thoughtful conversations across the disciplines. I hope that the participants find value in an entire day in which they can think about issues that are important to them and spend time planning how they can affect change in their own districts when they return home. And I hope to see you there.

If you don’t know about the K12 Online conference, you should! This year’s conference starts today, but you can participate any time.

The K12 Online conference is a progressive professional learning opportunity to engage educators worldwide around 21st century learning. Participants can watch pre-recorded sessions any time they wish. This conference is asynchronous, free, and online and takes place from Oct 22-25 and Oct 29-Nov. 2 with a pre-conference keynote on October 15. The 2012 theme is “Learn, Share, Remix.”

This Wed., Oct. 24 at 9:00pm Eastern Time, the Teachers Teaching Teachers (TTT) podcast will feature a live discussion about the K12 Online Conference in general and the Visioning New Curriculum keynote that went live today. We hope you can join us for this event.

In addition, Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) has an asynchronous discussion group to talk about all the K12 Online Conference videos, and we’d love to see you there as well!

On Nov. 2 at noon Eastern time, the #connectedpd Twitter chat will be having a discussion of K12 Online as well.

Oh, and my keynote on Visioning New Curriculum is posted here.

I hope you can participate in some of the activities around this fabulous learning opportunity!

I am a big fan of DS106, the digital storytelling MOOC (group? online course? community? it’s a mix, I guess), and especially of the Daily Create project there, which is a way to encourage myself to create something on a (not quite) daily basis.

As I’ve been thinking more about the maker movement and getting more involved in it, I’ve also been thinking more about how to encourage more learning activities centered on creativity.

For the last couple years, I’ve been helping to put on a local event for kids that is a part of a larger adult event focused on the cultural and natural heritage of our area. This year, I decided to do a short hands-on activity on digital photography, very roughly borrowing from the Daily Create.

Our group of kids for this was about 10 and included kids from age 4 to 14. Here was the overview we started with:

The kids especially liked making up stories to go with some of the photos we showed (slides 3-5). They were very creative, and I think this also helped them think about how photos can tell stories.

Then we gave kids little slips of paper with photo challenges on this. (This list was brainstormed with some of my Twitter friends. Thanks to all who contributed.)

Then we turned the kids loose with cameras to do the challenges. Not only did they *love* this activity, but they took some really great photos. Below are a few. (Note that we didn’t have access to computers for this activity, so all the focus was on the actual photography. Another dimension could be added with computers and editing activities.)

I was surprised how well this worked with very small preschool kids all the way up to high school kids. I think the kids took away all kinds of interested ideas and new ways of thinking. I hope this will lead them to thoughtful storytelling and creating in the future.

As always, feel free to borrow anything here for your own use if it’s helpful.

“Make a picture with a rock in it.” by 4 year old Emery:

[these pics to come pending approval]

“Make a picture with straight lines in it.” (by Arwen)

“Make a picture with curves in it.” (by Athena)

“Make a tower of rocks and take a picture of it.”

“Make a picture of someone who is sleeping.” (by Arwen)

August is Connected Educator month, and there are so many ways you can participate, whether you are already a “connected educator” or whether you are curious what all this is about!

Here is a calendar of events for the month.

This is a group we’ve set up at the P2PU School of Ed to talk about what it means to be a connected educator, as well as to explore topics like the first six weeks of school, Common Core standards, personalized learning, tech trends, and much more.

Below is a feed of what folks on the web are saying about Connected Educator month. And starting on August 1, this Twitter account will be featuring a day in the life of various connected educators.

We hope you’ll join us for some of these activities. Consider inviting a teacher who is new to being connected to join you as well to gain the benefits of being a part of the fabulous connected community!

image credit: Katherine Pangaro

Many schools don’t give student email accounts or permit students to use email at school. However, many Web 2.0 sites require unique email addresses, which poses a challenge.

A pretty usable workaround for this is this Gmail trick. If your teacher gmail account is ksmith@gmail.com and a student uses the email address ksmith+bemerson@gmail.com, all email to that address will go to you at ksmith@gmail.com. That allows you to register students for services that require a unique and valid email without maintaining or needing to monitor an email account for them.

[cross-posted from K12 Open Ed]

In my 4T Virtual conference session today, there was a lot of interest in how to make ebooks with open content, so I’m writing this short post with more details. (We’ll also be doing this at ISTE 2012 this year, so stay tuned for more resources and handouts on this.)

Here are steps for one, very easy way to do this:

1. Create your ebook content in Word (or LibreOffice…or even in Google Docs, exporting to a Word doc afterward), including images, etc.
   Make sure your images are your own or open licensed for sharing, and cite your sources!
2. Export the document to HTML (filtered) by doing Save As… with a Save As Type of “Web Page, Filtered.”
3. Download and install Calibre, a free, open source ebook tool.
4. Open Calibre, click Add Books, and add your HTML document.
5. Your book will then appear in the list in the main part of the screen. Highlight it and click Edit metadata to add a title, author, cover, etc.
6. You can continue going through the wizard, or close it and select Convert books to select your format.
   EPUB and MOBI (Kindle) are two of the most popular formats.
7. Your final ebooks will be in a folder called Calibre Library in your documents folder. You can also click Path: Click to open to navigate directly to that folder.

In the interest of getting this post up quickly, this is brief. If you have questions or need clarifications, post here or drop me an email. Hope this is useful.

And thanks again Liz Kolb and her team for putting together this great online learning opportunity!

Over the past year or so, I’ve been working with a consortium of four districts in New Mexico on a project to foster online and blended learning. It’s been a great experience that has benefited teachers and students and left me more convinced than ever of the power of technology to help differentiate instruction.

Here’s a short video that summarizes our work.

This weekend I was a part of a panel presentation at NSBA called “New Opportunities Presented by the Common Core: Deeper Learning, Open Educational Resources, and Increases in Long-Term Student Success.”

Among the main points of this presentation were:

• The Common Core standards offer a unique opportunity for schools to examine the interconnected realms of standards, curriculum, assessment, and professional development, and hopefully, to improve learning.
• Common Core represents a significant change. If you think you have implemented Common Core and your classrooms don’t look substantially different than they did before, you haven’t really implemented Common Core. (Related points: Cross-walk documents and superficial alignments are not the best tools to realize the benefits of this change.)
• New assessments are coming in 2014. They too will be very different. We need to explore how students are being prepared for these assessments and, of course, for the real world.

This doesn't tell you much about what students really know.

Are we preparing students for this type of assessment?

I feel a certain amount of sadness that most educators seem to view Common Core as yet another worthless series of hoops they are being asked to jump through, rather than as an opportunity to do the kind of deeper learning that many of us feel is missing from classrooms.

One of my concerns about Common Core is that many districts seem to be implementing the new standards very quickly, possibly without considering all the opportunities and ramifications. New instructional materials are being purchased hastily. Professional development and planning is inadequate.

In the audience of school board members I spoke with, approximately two-thirds said that they have already implemented or are well into implementing these new standards. Many are doing this without being aware of the forthcoming new assessments and without thorough thought about related curriculum and instructional materials issues.

For example, at a time in which many districts are making large curriculum purchases, might it be a good time to think about digital content? New ways to involve teachers? Etc.

As we discussed these issues, there was a fair amount of discontent in the audience about the current state of assessment. Teachers are not afforded the professionalism to do what they know is best for students. Charter schools are often lauded without being held to the same standards. Deeper learning is not happening in many classrooms. Many new mandates are unfunded. There was plenty of unhappiness and blame to go around.

But perhaps it is time to put aside the blame and start doing some things that we all believe are best for our students.

This point in time might be the best opportunity in decades to look deeply at standards, curriculum, assessment, and the professional role of our teachers — it is simply too important to rush through or not do to the best of our abilities.