This is the last TechForum of the season, and it’s a new city, Seattle, Washington. They have asked me to keynote this conference, and I was reminded last week that my very first conference keynote was one of the Technology & Learning TechExpo conferences, in New York City. So it’s coming full circle. I hope I do good!
The keynote will be “Telling the New Story.” I guess I should find a new title for this, but it’s what it is. Too much of schooling today is based on stories of teaching and learning that are decades and even centuries old. We live in a new era and it is a time of rapid change. Our stories about teaching, learning, education, schools, classrooms, all must change to reflect our children and the future we are preparing them for. For many of the students in our classrooms, the only real connection that they have with the previous century is their classrooms. This is not good!
Here are the online wiki handouts for the keynote address.
It will also be my honor to serve on a panel with Conn McQuinn and Tim Lauer. The topic will be new technologies. I am supposed to talk about the larger view of learning technologies, but I suspect that I’ll be talking about the learning technologies that our children use on their own time. So here are probably the best online wiki handouts for that topic.
Finally, I will do another Web 2.0 session, called The Finer Points. The organizers of TechForum want us to ramp up our topics to the tech savvy educators who usually attend these sessions. I find it difficult, though, when so many in the audience don’t know what a blog is. So this time I’ll be starting with fundamentals of Web 2.0 — a very brief half-hour overview, and then open it up to a more unconference style of event.
