Last week I had the chance to attend this symposium with a couple hundred of my IT and ET colleagues. It was a great event to network, learn and reflect on what we are doing in each of our districts.
Some of the things that I took away from this event:
1) Microsoft's Productivity and Future Vision
Is this what you see in the future? When, how far away are we? I know I leaned over to IT Darcy a number of times and asked him when I could get this in our classrooms! 2) Digital Citizenship: Tania Sterling (@taniasterling) was great. She shared this LiveBinder full of resources for digital citizenship in our schools. There were two ideas that I want to run with
Family Acceptable Use Agreement - Parents and students all sign them, but do they really know what they mean? I want to make a serious effort in engaging our parents in this conversation and education.
Students involved in PD - students may be our best resource as we navigate 21st century skills. It's time to enable and encourage them to become leaders. During upcoming PD sessions I would like to use students as facilitators.
3) Google - Only Google could fill a room with a sessions that starts at 7:45am!! The cloud seems to be the direction that PWSD is taking, although we still need to decide between Google Apps and Live@Edu, hopefully soon!
Google is in process of totally revamping Google Presentation, otherwise know as the ugly step child of Google Docs
Their motto is "Don't be Evil" when they look at doing things
20% on innovation, that is the rule for all Google employees. Each week one days is spent on something that is not work, can you imagine?
Will it stay free for education? Each mail box cost approximately $1 to create and maintain. Google charges business $50, keeping it free for education.
4) What are you most excited about in Alberta Education? (I will admit this was easier to answer before the budget announcement Thursday afternoon but...) I am most excited about the never ending possibilities there are in education right now. It is truly an exciting time to be involved in teaching and learning as it continues to evolve. More exciting are the amazing people that I get to work with and connect with. It is not dull and I feel like I have an amazing support system no matter what happens!
This was a first for me. I have used elluminate to join online PD sessions with over 300 teachers in them, but I have never done it with students.
The event was organized by Brenda Dyck with the Calgary Regional Learning Consortium. Physically the event was hosted at the Calgary School for Girls but the virtual attendants included classrooms from around Alberta and the United States. The topic, what does citizenry look like in a digital world?
The days started with a 90 minute panel discussion. Members of the panel varied from the Mayor of Calgary to bloggers who have published books to students from the Calgary School for Girls. All facilitated by Dr. Alec Couros.
We had 3 students computers set up so that the students could add questions to the elluminate chat room. While the panel was excellent, watching a screen with a voice over made the students fairly restless. At the first nutrition break we broke out the lap tops and set up Today's Meet for our own back channel.
With our 15 laptops, student ipods and the open wireless, every student had a device and the change in engagement was amazing. (You can see the entire transcript of our back channel here)
The remainder of the day was broke into short presentations, a question for the class to discuss and post on a Google Doc and then back channel. There were some great comments on what should be public and what should remain private, how easy it is to find information on the Internet and a number of ah-ha moments on the long term effects of sharing too much. Our Google Doc can be found here.
To sum up the day students were asked to blog about what they learned at the Student Digital Citizenship Symposium. Being only their second time blogging, they would love some comments. To add to the excitement of the day, students were sent home early because of inclement weather. It was a crazy day.
Special thanks to Sandi Busch and her wonder 7A ELA class at Hythe Regional School. A big thanks to Brenda Dyck with the Calgary Regional Consortium who let us in on this very interesting opportunity. We are hoping that we can hold a Student Digital Citizenship Symposium - Northern Edition, in the near future.
