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August 10, 2013, at 08:43 AM EST by 64.134.178.159 -

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EMcC Ok, gonna check out Gravatar. 9 Aug 2013 - 8:58:47

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I have to say that I was surprised and impressed with the apparent success of your EdCamp. Usually these things are attended by people who are EdCampers, already familiar with and bought-into the who concept. I was a little dubious about having one imposed on a group of educators, but it wasn't the first thing that pleasantly surprised me about the junior and high school teachers at North-Scott :-) - dfw

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It's any teacher's best tool! ..and how do you test that? - dfw

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Obviously, it didn't work for me. I found that I needed to empty the cache on my browser. I learned something :-) - dfw

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It's Gravatar - http://en.gravatar.com - dfw

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It must be cleaver ;-). The best thing that I got from being named one of the top ten contributors to ed tech was a cool Avatar, - dfw

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It certainly doesn't start out that way. But as I implied, it shouldn't always look easy. Learners should watch us learn, and struggling with what doesn't look easy is, and looks like, learning. When I use to do hands-on workshops, I would introduce tools that I'd never used before, so that the participants would see me learn to use the tools and contribute to that learning. - dfw

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One of the purposes of the day's event was to convince you that the best staff development is casual. It's teachers sharing with each other, with joy, experience, enthusiasm, and confidence. - dfw

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I don't mind one bit, except that it took so long for you to see the spreadsheet demonstration. I've done that one for years and it continues to earn a huge response. - dfw

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But what message does that send to learners, who are to become lifelong learners. Frankly, I like the term learning lifestyle better. - dfw

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Big bummer. I know that the district is working frantically on that. - dfw

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Entire quote: "20th century education was defined by its limits: the walls of the classroom, covers of the textbook, confines of the bell schedule. 21st century education must be defined by its lack of limits." Learning should not be made to happen in a container. Yet our government imposed accountability system forces us to do just that. - dfw

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Michele "I'm not preparing students for my future. I'm preparing them for theirs." 9 Aug 2013 - 9:11:11

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If that's what you got from my talk, then I did my job. I'm not going to get up and tell you four things you can do with a Chromebook. I'm trying to convince you that you can invent a thousand things. - dfw

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"..the future they are going to choose. The future that your students are going to invent." - dfw

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It's what I like about the Asian approach, of valuing struggle. If our goal is to make students struggle, then our practice will be problem solving. Here's the link to the NPR article: http://goo.gl/vQCEK - dfw

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I'm increasingly using this as my definition for literacy, "The skills involved in using one's information environment to learn what they need to know, to do what they need to do." - dfw

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I hope that they don't stop learning that in school, at least for a while. But I have to say that having been involved with educational technology for more than 30 years now, it's all becoming incredibly reliable, and it will get a lot better. - dfw

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God question, Ashley.

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Good question, Ashley.

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Books are an amazingly useful technology, and won't go away soon (I hope!). But there are some things that will likely stop appearing in book form. It's one of my arguments about our children all learning to use tech. So much of what we need on a daily basis is becoming digital and networked and increasingly exclusively digital and networked, that if you can't access that information, then you may as well not know how to read. If reading is "essential," then universal access to digital networked information is equally "essential." - dfw

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I didn't know about that. Will have to look that up. I'll say here that I learned about a lot of resources going around and sitting in some of your EdCamp sessions. Many of you are quite on-top of this stuff. - dfw

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Yes! But I would say, "Validate, Validate, Validate." The purpose is not to find accuracy as much as it is to find legitimacy. Does the information help us accomplish our goal. We write in order to accomplish a goal. Sometimes, it is that the information is false, that it helps us accomplish our goals. Case in point was the text about caffeine. My goal was to make a point about the universality of false information. So I needed some false information to accomplish that point. - dfw

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..and how can you make exposing what's true part of the culture of your school. - dfw

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:-) - dfw

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Well put. - dfw

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Interestingly, that's a question I got from parents the night before. Personally, I see not contradiction here. Access to digital, networked, and abundant information empowers learners. That empowerment can be applied to just about any learning. height='25' align='right'>

I did imply in my response that I have some objections to national standards, and it has nothing to do with government takeover. If we agree that we are preparing our children for a future that we can not clearly describe, then believing that any of us can claim to know what our children need to be learning today is arrogance to the highest degree. I agree that there is a common core of knowledge and skills that our children need. But to push it the way that the "Common Core" is being promoted can easily negate the passionate learning that our children desperately need to be experiencing. - dfw

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See above, and constantly talk about this with other teachers in your school, in your district, in other districts and other countries. You can keep up by engaging in the greater teacher conversation. - dfw

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I am of the age that I become automatically skeptical about any practice that becomes as institutional as Flipped Classroom has become. But I have, for a very long time, said that the great unused resource to us is the time that our children are out of the classroom. One of my Ah Ha! during the EdCamp was hearing the PE teacher talk about how he'd flipped his classes. The P happens at school and the E outside the classroom. Too cool for school! - dfw

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kCarrie Lane @cmlane13

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Carrie Lane @cmlane13

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It was a odd session, at least while I was in there. No one knew much about Evernote, including myself. I'll repeat my suggestion that you just give it to the kids and let them find and invent ways to use it, and teach each other. - dfw

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It looked like a huge success to me. - dfw

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I think that this idea of information scarcity vs information abundance is huge. It changes so much about education and what it means to be educated. - dfw

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Scratch is cool, and there are a number of such languages to make programming cool for students. It's a great problem solving activity and being enthusiastically promoted in education today. It's not to make all you children want to become programmers, though degrees being conferred in computer science continue to decline: http://goo.gl/EufWj - dfw

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I hadn't made the connection between struggle and starting small. Thanks! - dfw

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It's what they do outside the classroom. - dfw

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And so do we. It's a learning skill. It's part of a learning lifestyle. - dfw

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9 Aug 2013 - 13:17:19

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9 Aug 2013 - 13:17:19

Thanks! Don't know why that name escaped me. Thanks so much for the day and the learning that I experienced. Have a great year! - dfw

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