If you read my blog yesterday, you know that these guys are working me hard. I’ve been looking forward to this hard work, after presenting to school and school board administrators a month ago at Blue Mountain.

Today, I’ll be talking to more than 700 educators in Owen Sound, and thousands of other educators via the magic of video conferencing. The topics will be millennials, a flattening world, and the changing nature of information and its affects on literacy. Here are three wiki handout pages that will be useful for later reference:

• New Stories
• Millennials
• New Literacy

• Wiki for Questions & Observations

In the afternoon, I will teach an extended workshop for educators who have signed up. This will begin with some observations about the morning keynote and then head off in its own direction after that. I suspect that there will be a lot of coverage of the new web, so here is a wiki handout for that topic:

• Harnessing the New Shape of Information

And — this evening, I will be presenting to parents and other community members back here in Owen Sound. This presentation will include information about safety in a digital world, but also an emphasis on the positive aspects of the new web. Online handouts here:

• Parenting Millennials

This is a graduate level class taught at North Carolina State University. They use my book as one of their texts, so I come and speak to the class each year. It’s lots of fun, and I always learn something.

The participants are students in the graduate school, and for this class they are mostly working on reading degrees.

The basic structure of this presentation/discussion will be contemporary literacy. Here are the wiki notes for that session:

• Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century

Today is being spent with education leaders from throughout Central Florida. The program, managed from the University of Central Florida and funded by Progress Energy. They bring in speakers several times a year to provide leadership development opportunities for central office and school administrations.

Today, we’ll be looking at the future (most of it already happening today), literacy, and education leadership through story telling. Here are the wiki handouts.

• Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century
• Telling the New Story

After the morning’s presentation, we will have a panel discussion with selected administrators from the region. The goal is a group-wide conversation about education and the challenges of a rapidly changing world. I hope to podcast this discussion soon.

This will be a fairly dense presentation with three topics rolled into one. I know that my audience can take it, because they are the Pinckney School District, near Ann Arbor, Michigan. The basic structure will be Telling the New Story. The district leaders who have invited me here saw the video of my presentation at NECC, and explicitly asked for that message.

• Telling the New Story — Wiki Handouts

They are also anxious in help their teachers know today’s children. They go by lots of names, but I call them the Millennials. Very few of our students have any conscious association with the 1900s.

• Retooling for Millennial Children — Wiki Handouts

Finally, this is a Web 2.0 district, or well on their way. All of the principals received training in producing a podcast this summer. So I’ll be rolling in some Web 2.0 concepts.

• Harnessing the New Shape of Information — Wiki Handouts

This presentation might be a little edgy, because of the topics, though if it can’t be included as part of the new story, then it probably isn’t relevant.

I’m in the lovely town of Chaska, Minnesota. It’s one of my favorite states to work in, especially when its in the 90s at home and incredibly humid, and it’s 75 and dry here.

It’s the first week back to school for the teachers, and the administration is sponsoring a district-wide gathering at the high school, with a breakfast, sponsored by Dell. The message will be technology, but the language will be information. This appears to be a very forward looking school district, and I will be urging them to include their students as vision makers. They get it. It’s about the Information.
Online handouts can be found here:

• Literacy & Learning in the 21st Century

One of the best parts of what I do is getting to attend education conferences all over the country — and occasionally in other countries. It is unfortunate that most teachers do not have the opportunity to attend conferences. However, a handful of school districts solve this problem by organizing their own local conferences, bringing in speakers from outside the district to share new ideas and strategies. Loudoun County, Virginia is one such district who has provided this service for years. I believe that today will be my third Loudoun conference. A clear indication of the quality of this conference is the fact that last year they brought in Ian Jukes as the keynote speaker.

As an experiment, we will be producing our own wiki handouts for these workshops. They can be accessed by clicking the following link:

• New Literacy
• New Web

I have had the opportunity, over the last few weeks, to speak at some of the most innovative and courageous schools in the country. They were schools that were represented at the Laptop Institute, in Memphis — and today, I get to present a range of issues to teachers at St. Marks High School in Wilmington Delaware. This is a highly regarded school with a dynamic program in technology, and a dynamic information officer.

We’ll be covering a number of issues, in a very short period of time, including:

• A different look at Literacy,
• I new look at Millennials,
• Teleconferencing, and
• Podcasting

Then I get to go home! 😉

I am sitting in the Blue Mountain Resort, overlooking Nottawasaga Bay about two hours north of Toronto. It is a beautiful, if confusing place. Today I’ll be working with administrators from the schools and systems that comprise the Bluewater District School Board. The workshop is called Teaching & Learning on the Edge of Change. We’ll be exploring how the world is changing, especially how the information landscape has changed, how our children have changed, and what it all means in terms of how and what we teach. We’ll also be exploring some new stories that are emerging out of this time of rapid change, stories that we can use to help us retool teaching and learning.

The online wiki handouts for The Edge of Change can be found here.

• Teaching & Learning on the Edge of Change
• Telling the New Story

The second day of the retreat will be devoted to the new Web 2.0 applications and their potential impact on education.

• Harnessing the New Shape of Information

Technorati Tags : warlick education bluewater admin2.0

At a the gateway to the prairie, and I learned quite a bit about fontier life last night in the parking lot of my hotel. See this morning’s blog about adventures.

Today, I’m speaking at the opening of the 2006-2007 school year in Mitchell. I’ll be rolling two presentations together, Redefining Literacy and redefining the students in our classrooms, the Millennials. I guess that the message is that it isn’t our father’s future any more and that an unpredictable future requires a different notion of what literacy is, that it is far richer and much more exciting that merely being able to decode text. It’s learning literacy, because learning is what our children will be doing their rest of their lives.

Here are links to my wiki handouts for the day:

• Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century
• Retool our Classrooms for the Millennial Generation

After this presentation, I’ll be meeting with the technology staff to discuss some of their goals and to explore, together, so new opportunities. Hopefully, this will be a learning experience for all of us.

I have been looking forward to this, ever since presenting at the Laptop Institute a few weeks ago. It will be so nice to return to the fantastic folks at the school. But I am also excited about the day. I’ll be giving three presentations, each followed by breakout extended activities.

The first part of the day will be devoted to looking at contemporary literacy as a focal point for making better use of each student’s laptop, rather than focusing on integrating technology. That address is called,

• Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century

The faculty of the school will then breakout into groups and collaborate in building a school-wide wiki document to help in making better use of their 1:1 setup.

That breakout will be followed by a presentation on Millennials, this generation of children who are, on almost every measure, unique in history. That presentation is called,

• Educating the Millennials

After that presentation, the faculty will have lunch, during which, they will each establish a list of three new words that they will use in their welcoming messages this year, words that address the unique characteristics of today’s youngsters and their experience. Then they will meet in smaller groups, where the technology staff of the school will help them to set up a blog and then write a welcome message to their incoming students.

The final address will be about Web 2.0. I’ll talk about the history and philosophy of blogging, the new shape that information has taken, and specific tools such as RSS, wikis, aggregators, social bookmarks, social media, and others. That address is called,

• Harnessing the New Shape of Information — Web 2.0

This will end the day, but the technology staff will continue to work together to devise ways that they might make their one to one school, a school 2.0.